


Sky Full of Glass

by SofiaBane



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: BAMF Harry Potter, But so is Voldemort, Harry's a snarky little shit, Lots of feelings about immortality, M/M, Master of Death Harry Potter, Or at least time fuckery, Slow Burn, That's what makes them soulmates, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-02 20:32:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16312235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SofiaBane/pseuds/SofiaBane
Summary: The Horcruxes have become unstuck in time, and it’s the responsibility of the Master of Death to figure out why. And since Voldemort needs to be punished for transgressing into the realm of Death anyway, he might as well come along.





	Sky Full of Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wynnebat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/gifts).



I.

Harry watches the final battle more times than he strictly needs to. There is a ‘final battle’ of some sort in every timeline he visits. It’s typically at Hogwarts, his friends and the Order and faculty all fighting on his behalf. Sometimes it’s elsewhere in Britain: in London, or in Wiltshire, or in one disastrous timeline, in the mountains of Wales, getting a flock of Welsh green dragons involved. Sometimes Voldemort has been a terrorist as Harry first knew him, but other times he’s held rather more legitimacy, in some prestigious government position. A few times Harry fought _Professor Riddle_ , the Hogwarts professor hired by Albus Dumbledore. Riddle there hoodwinked the rest of the castle as he amassed three generations of an army while teaching them. Professor Riddle’s hair began thinning before he’d turned forty, Harry notes with some malicious satisfaction every time he was in one of those timelines.

But it is the prophecy that holds all these worlds together. It goes without saying that in the end, every war is one between Voldemort and Harry. In every timeline he’d seen so far, Harry has had to die first. He doesn’t take it personally; the Master of Death must know the tools of his trade, after all. In every timeline the Horcruxes are captured, dismantled, or destroyed first. (And sometimes he thinks that the magic of Horcruxes also transgresses timelines, because they tend to be destroyed in the same way across diverse timelines. He’s not a scholar, though; perhaps he’ll ask an Unspeakable to look into the phenomenon someday.) Voldemort doesn’t always fight with the elder wand, but when he does, it always resists him. Harry sees this afterward, how much his wand _yearns_ to be held by its rightful owner. And sometimes Voldemort even duels with spells beyond Avada Kedavra. Imagine that.

But every time, he loses. Sometimes this means death, and sometimes it means capture and then a Dementor’s Kiss. People will always call to push him through the Veil, but the Ministry protests that as they don’t know what lies beyond it (Harry knows, but he’s not telling), there’s no certainty Voldemort would _stay_ non-existent. They imprison him alone in Azkaban or Nurmengard sometimes, where he promptly goes mad.

But in _this_ timeline – it’s not any more real than the others, but it’s near to the one where he grew up, and it’s the one he just happened to pull open and step into today – Voldemort was captured alive in Hogwarts. The elder wand, instead of casting Avada Kedavra for him, had cast a sort of cage, pinning Voldemort to the spot. Harry and the Aurors had run in at once, but the cage was magically enervating, and Voldemort was unconscious by the time they reached him. It all happened so fast that the crowds in the Great Hall hadn’t even realized they’d won before Harry was lifting his wand, apparating Voldemort and the nearest Aurors to the Ministry’s holding cells together.

It is itself enough of a display of power that the Ministry officials are listening when Harry says that Voldemort is _his_. “I am the Master of Death,” he says flatly, and it makes them all step back even if they don’t understand what it _means_. He will take their memories of this declaration shortly, leaving them with just the impression that he is responsible for all this and should be heeded. It will be enough. “And I’ve seen him imprisoned, in Azkaban and Nurmengard. I’ve seen him Kissed. It doesn’t work. This time, I’m keeping him somewhere more secure.”

“Harry,” Kingsley says, attempting to be diplomatic even as the top Ministry officials have just been told that the scrawny seventeen year old is making unilateral decisions now. “There is protocol. There is _justice_ , and it will come in the form of a trial.”

“You want a trial?” Harry says doubtfully. That’s also a rarity, in these timelines.

“Yes. I would.”

“Right. Well. I guess you can hold a trial. But I’m keeping him somewhere safe until then.”

Kingsley runs a hand down his face. They never believe him, entirely. Sometimes they arrest him. Sometimes they argue that the elder wand is the property of the Ministry for some inane reason, and Harry should relinquish it immediately. A few times, they’ve tried to commit him to the long term psychiatric ward in St. Mungo’s. So now Harry will tell people he’s the Master of Death quite often, but he must quietly alter their memories so it only remains in their subconscious at best. Because really, it’s _time_ that is the purview of the Master of Death. He holds the rules of space-time together, patching anomalies and ensuring each of the dimensions is self-contained. As memories are only remnants of time, it is trivial to fix them.

Except for the Horcruxes.

The Horcruxes have become unstuck in time, swirling around bits of Voldemort’s life where they’re not supposed to be. On its own this would be annoying, especially since Harry hasn’t worked out the cause yet. But then there’s the matter that every time a Horcrux is destroyed in another dimension, it _hurts_ Harry. His magic falters for awhile. Once he was trapped in a very unpleasant dimension (Ludo Bagman had become Minister, and he was stupider even than anyone had anticipated) for almost three days because he didn’t have the power to transport himself elsewhere. He must figure this out, either to separate their magic or to keep Voldemort – every iteration of him in every dimension – in some sort of stasis so that he will stop _dying_ already, because that hurts Harry just as much. So he had come back to this timeline for as good a starting point as any.

“This is absurd,” Robards says behind Kingsley. “He’ll await trial in Azkaban, like all his monstrous Death Eaters. Prophecy or no, _you_ are not responsible for him.”

“I am, actually.” Harry is the Master of Death; Voldemort is the mortal who has transgressed his domain and must be punished. The idea that this Ministry even understands the _scope_ of Voldemort’s transgression is laughable. But then, most wixies don’t really believe in immortality. Not properly.

They are having this conversation just outside Voldemort’s holding cell, far beneath the Ministry’s lowest level. If he were awake he could probably hear them from the other side of the door. Is that rude, to talk about someone in front of their unconscious body? Harry’s not sure. In any case, he’s had a long day and arguing with Ministry officials – or really mortals altogether, but _especially_ Ministry-affiliated mortals – is pointless. He doesn’t even need to step into the cell. “Excuse me,” he says, and reaches for the handle. Then he wills a new dimension into existence, and they are pulled away from this damp corridor.

The door handle now belongs to the wide door of a free-standing tower, the only structure marring a flat and foggy landscape. He hadn’t been thinking of any prison in particular, so this will suffice. He pulls the door open.

Empty, largely. He will at least allow Voldemort to pick out his own furnishings. That will be an act of generosity on Harry’s part. But the ground floor is meant as some sort of visiting room, bisected with surveillance magic like the plexiglass partitions in Muggle prison set-ups. Harry crosses it and climbs the stairs to find his prisoner.

He’s in an alcove on the third floor, unconscious and still crumpled in a heap. Strands of magic from the erstwhile cage still cling to his robes. Harry vanishes the strands, then swishes his wand before him. “ _Rennervate_.”

Voldemort inhales sharply, but then he’s choking, coughing, spitting blood even as he climbs to his feet. “I killed you,” he rasps. “I killed you in the forest and I killed you in the Great Hall. _Why won’t you die_?”

His stance is unsteady but Harry’s not inclined to conjure him a seat of any sort. “Funny, that. You’d think you’d get bored of it after awhile. Dispirited, at least.”

Voldemort is leaning against the stone wall, and quick checks of his robes indicate he once had hidden spare wands there. But – Harry doesn’t want him to have magic, so he doesn’t have magic. So Voldemort lapses into strategic silence, waiting for Harry’s explanation.

And it’s just so fucking _entitled_ , the look of haughty expectation. As though Harry is here to report to him like one of his Death Eaters. “I’ll be back in a month to check on you,” Harry says instead, and turns to go.

“ _Potter_.” Voldemort lunges forward – his reflexes are good for his age and general brokenness, and his grip on Harry’s wrist is strong.

Still, Harry shakes him off. “You’ve always called me Harry,” he says, descending the stairs and expecting Voldemort to follow. “Not so fond of me, now that you’ve lost?”

Voldemort does descend the stairs, pushing past Harry to get to the bottom first. Rude. “Where are they?” he snaps when Harry comes up behind him, looking around at the empty visiting room and the front door beyond it.

“Who?”

“ _Everyone_ ,” Voldemort seethes. “The Aurors, the Ministry, your wretched _Order_. The ones who are properly in charge. I will not surrender to a _child_.”

He finds this shameful. Harry is smiling, in part because it’s funny and in part to further infuriate Voldemort. “You didn’t care for the Ministry’s authority before,” he says, playing extremely dumb.

“Potter – “

“Anyway,” Harry says, speaking over him, “I _am_ in charge. Though they’ll have a hard time believing it, too.”

If this is a typical timeline, Voldemort doesn’t know of the Deathly Hallows. It’s not his fault, that he never got caught up on the children’s books that nobody read him. But Harry isn’t inclined to tell him at the moment. Maybe next time, if he asks nicely.

“This isn’t itself a punishment,” he says to Voldemort. “It is a holding cell. You trespassed into our realm, and there are consequences for that. Death is _quite_ unhappy with you. I’ve had to beg her away from you more than once.” Voldemort’s eyes go glittery and curious, but Harry continues. “We haven’t yet decided your fate because – well, the mortals all use death as a punishment. But it’s not a _punishment_ ,” he says with sincere disgust. “It’s an inevitability. So.”

Voldemort’s impatience with the _child_ before him has vanished, replaced with hungry curiosity. “What are you?” he asks lowly.

“You really don’t deserve to know. What sort of furniture d’you want?” He’s walking into the adjacent kitchen, where a Muggle refrigerator hums. “Do you understand Muggle appliances? See, this is a microwave, and this is an electric kettle. Oh, not that you’ve actually got to eat. You should be kept pretty thoroughly in stasis here. You _can_ eat if you’d like, but you haven’t got to. You can sleep, but you haven’t got to. You can shit?” he wonders aloud. “I honestly don’t know. You’ll have to tell me next month. Oh,  and you’ll heal here, too. Even otherwise fatal injuries. So you can’t kill yourself. Or would you even try?” he asks, squinting at Voldemort. “Sometimes you do, but more often someone else kills you first. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“Sometimes… I will kill myself?”

“You didn’t say, _do_ you understand how an electric kettle works? I’d put one on right now, but I haven’t got the time.” And he laughs at the joke, mostly funny because Voldemort doesn’t get it.

“This is not helpful.” Voldemort is cycling through quite a lot of emotions, for him – anger to curiosity to cunning, back to anger. “Tell me what you are. Tell me where I am.” And for a moment his tone is that of young Tom Riddle. _Prove it_.

“ _As I said_ , it’s a holding cell. This world needs a bit of time to rebuild without you. With any luck, they will forget you entirely,” Harry says brightly. “And you need a _timeout_ , anyway. I’ve never had children – I thought it’d be irresponsible – but my own timeouts involved being locked beneath the stairs, you know. So consider this entire tower _generous_ on my part. Here.” He pulls out his wand and he’s conjuring furniture, the weighty antique sort like that of Grimmauld Place, because he knows Voldemort’s aesthetic. “If you want to change anything, you could probably just wish for it. None of this is particularly real. Honestly, you may even be able to wish yourself out. It really doesn’t matter.” He strides back into the visiting room, putting in poufs and ottomans like the Divination classroom. “What do you _do_?” he asks. “Like, for fun. Ways to pass the time.”

But Voldemort has come up exactly in his blind spot, and then he’s lunging and snatching the elder wand from Harry’s loose grasp and twisting to apparate away, all in one motion. Harry winces as he is quite brutally splinched. It cuts his wrists to the bone, and winds up his arms in fractals. The elder wand, bloodstained _as usual_ , clatters to the floor along with the dark spatters of Voldemort’s blood.

Harry doesn’t bother to tell him that was stupid. He knows, they both know. Voldemort’s teeth are clenched – how interesting that he can still feel pain here, Harry thinks – and he’s clutching his arms to his chest. But already his flesh is knitting itself back together.

“Every time I watch you fight with a wand that _never wanted you_ …” Harry says, then stops, shaking his head.

“It’s the wand,” Voldemort says through gritted teeth. “The wand has made you what you are.”

“Sure,” Harry agrees. “I mean, that’s quite a good guess.” He hadn’t needed to clean off the wand before picking it up. Like Gryffindor’s sword, it will literally absorb blood, strengthened by it. “Look, I don’t give a shit if you’re bored here except, ah, you might go a bit unhinged? _More_ unhinged,” he amends. “I’ll leave you some books. Even prisoners get books.” He casts a few bookshelves along the far wall. “And I dunno, a piano? An easel? Those Death Eater masks were quite pretty, did you design them yourself?”

Voldemort has pulled back his sleeves, watching the splinching fade from his pale flesh, leaving pink traces. “It’s good, isn’t it,” Harry says. “Better than those shitty Horcruxes, that happily sacrificed your body. Sounds painful.”

“It was,” he says flatly. “You don’t want anything from me. You haven’t asked anything of me yet.”

“No, I haven’t. What would I need from you?”

While he’d actually be interested in a sincere answer, Voldemort doesn’t offer one. “Then you may go.”

“Oh, _may_ I?” Harry laughs, delighted. “You’re right, I guess. I’m not here for the brilliant company. I can see myself out.”

But Voldemort’s look at the magic-plexiglass-boundary separating them from the door is so calculating that Harry laughs again. “You might as well step outside with me,” he says, and vanishes the barrier altogether. “It really doesn’t matter.” He leads Voldemort to the door. “Because – “ Opening the door, he lifts the fog to reveal the facsimile of a meadow, with every detail carved in perfectly clear glass. The effect is beautiful and blinding, stretching on forever. It looks only half-real. “You’ve got this entire plane of existence to yourself.” There’s an intake of breath, but Harry doesn’t look back at him. “Be good.” And he steps out of this plane briskly.

 

He returns to the timeline when and where he left it. The minds of the Ministry officials have been slightly altered,  that they now recall Voldemort’s death in the Great Hall, and Harry burning his body on an island in the middle of the lake. Granted, there’s a timeline where this actually happens, and if Harry lets these false memories linger too long, the two dimensions may get tangled, which is always a fucking pain in the arse to fix. Anyway, Harry returns to the Ministry to see Kingsley being sworn in as Minister, with Andromeda Tonks as his Deputy. Pius Thicknesse will survive, but only after a few long recuperative years in St. Mungo’s. Already reporters are crowding the Ministry atrium, chattering into tape recorders and mics as every manner of rumor is circulated.

Harry steps behind Kingsley as though he were always meant to be there. He would not like to be Minister – he never spends long in the timelines in which he’s been elected, he finds the story dull – but here a nice sinecurial position may have some value.

Kingsley turns as though he’d known Harry was behind him already. “They want to hear from you,” he says lowly, “far more than from me.”

Harry puts on his charming Chosen One _who, me_? demeanor. “I mean, if you want.” He takes the enchanted mic and gives the reporters the flawless victory speech he’s given in a hundred different timelines before.

By the end of it, half the world is in love with him. He could ask for any Ministry position he wanted. He could tell Robards to clean out his office and lick Harry’s boots as he sacked himself. But god, life as an Auror was really no break from his crime-fighting childhood; why would anyone wish to see him confined to do it for literally his _entire life_? Instead, he pushes his mop of hair off his face, giving a cute smile to the Ministry officials now listening to him. “I thought I might like to work on… love?”

He is hilariously unqualified to be an Unspeakable. Nobody objects, however. The optics of the Chosen One going to work on Important Ministry Things appeals to them too much. So Harry’s shaking hands and kissing babies and getting introduced to the Prime Enigma (god almighty, can they not just say _Director_ ) of the Department of Mysteries.

It’s not the first time he’s seen the department – the prophecy hall notwithstanding – but he’s typically only here for the veil. A few times Dumbledore sent him here for his Horcrux to be studied (not helpful, it couldn’t be extracted and he still had to die) and there were a few times that some of the _other_ Horcruxes ended up as artefacts here. But love, he’s quite proud of that one. The department of time would be the more obvious position for him to take, but in the department of love, he may actually learn something new.

 

When he’s seen enough, he steps out of this timeline, hovering between dimensions as he considers his course of action. Voldemort.  It is _obnoxious_ how much deeper into the realm of death he reached, more than nearly any other mortal. It doesn’t, on its own, break any of the structural universe that Harry tends to – people who dabble in time travel or multi-dimensional travel are on the whole far more critical a threat. Thank _fuck_ Voldemort never pursued these magics, really, though Harry doesn’t understand why he didn’t. If he’s so committed to immortality above all, taking refuge in a stable time loop to escape for awhile wouldn’t even be difficult. Instead, each version of Voldemort remains neatly within his own timeline, in a fairly linear fashion. Yet not only do the Horcruxes seem to stretch across dimensions, they affect Harry himself. _Nothing_ affects Harry these days.

It’s probably an inane comparison, but he tends to think of each dimension as its own story. He can pick up an infinite number of books and flip to an infinite number of pages. Well, not strictly infinite – there are some variations on the world that simply do not exist, and he’s suspicious that they’d been destroyed by a previous Master of Death for some reason. But _nearly_ infinite.

Harry conceptualizes the interstitial space between dimensions as a high mountaintop, looking down into the valleys and villages of all the little worlds he oversees. Death and her daemons rarely venture this high up – they are busy, anyway. So he is alone with his birds soaring overhead. And while one might expect them to be vultures or ravens or crows, something suitably gothic, Harry typically prefers tropical birds. He thinks they’re funny, and they remind him of Sirius. What’s also funny is when he’s got a swarm of Dementors nearby as well and he charms their robes into bright yellow and magenta and teal, to coordinate with his birds. They _sulk_ when he does this, and it’s glorious.

There is nobody around to tell Harry he doesn’t take his vocation seriously enough.

There’s a lake in this setting when he wants one. He pulls off his robes, dropping them on the grass, and wades in. Floating on his back, he stares up at the glass-colored sky. He forgets to breathe, but it hardly matters.

 

II.

June 2, 1998. Or that’s the date it would be if he were coming from that timeline, but he isn’t. He spent more time recently in a variation of Grindelwald’s timeline. The genocide is not properly Harry’s interest, really – they all die like they were meant to, no spacetime-breaking magic, so it’s fine for a certain value of ‘fine.’ But Harry finds temporal anomalies at Nurmengard, and he suspects Grindelwald was planning an escape out a wormhole if he ever lost his war, so Harry’s gone to patch that bullshit. He now has very strong and disdainful feelings about Grindelwald himself after spending a few of his weeks in his camp. He doesn’t know what Albus ever saw in him.

So he dimension-skips from Switzerland 1944 in that timeline to – well, Voldemort’s realm, and they may as well mark the time by the world from which Harry had taken him. A month after _that_ war, _that_ defeat, _that_ imprisonment.

Harry arrives outside the tower and finds that there are now paths worn down before it, bits of glass ground nearly to sand. He double-checks his mental math – he _thinks_ he has only left Voldemort alone for a month, his time. But the place carries echoes of tense, frustrated energy. He could watch the entire timelapse of Voldemort pacing the garden, if he wanted. Instead, he lets himself in.

The entire ground floor is warm from the kitchen. Harry approaches and finds it empty, but there’s a full and fresh tea tray waiting on the sideboard. If it’s a trap, it’s a poor one. Harry puts a lemon biscuit in his mouth before levitating the tray before him. He takes the stairs.

Three floors up, and he finds Voldemort has moved all the books to a narrow room with a stained glass window. And there’s a few armchairs in here too, including the one in which he is currently sprawled, his legs dangling over the arm like he’s an unruly teenager. “Your library is shit,” he informs Harry, not moving as he enters.

“Yeah, probably. I didn’t want you to have anything useful.” He sizes up the bookcases. “Did you carry these up by hand?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t. He’s got some amount of magic. It’s fine, but Harry can hardly _say_ it’s fine, just yet. “Ah.” He sets the tea tray between them, before similarly sprawling in an armchair. “So. Are you well?”

“This house is haunted.”

Well, that’s not a great sign. A month in and he’s already hallucinating. “Friend or foe?” He eats another lemon biscuit.

Voldemort glares. “They are _yours_. Whatever you are.”

His tone has lost some of its force – it only takes a few days for a human’s capacity for speech to deteriorate in isolation. He stumbles over a few syllables, needs to think about a few words. Harry sees that it frustrates him.

“I promise we’re alone,” Harry says solemnly. “Though really, leaving you with some company wouldn’t be a bad idea. Some Inferi?” he muses. “Some daemons? Some of them are quite clever. Or maybe a pet. No snakes, though,” he warns, looking over his glasses. “Not really on-brand for me. Since they’re emblems of eternal life and all.”

“You don’t die,” Voldemort says sharply. “Snakes are perfectly suited.”

Harry’s laugh is a little hollow. “I’ve died more times than I can count,” he says. “But then – so have you. Or haven’t you figured out my _riddles_?”

The pun is childish and they both know it. “Tell me,” Voldemort says, once more imperious. “Tell me, or tell me I’ve gone mad.”

“Mm.” He pours two cups of tea. He knows how Voldemort takes it, too – honey, lemon, no milk – after a timeline in which Harry posed among his inner circle for awhile. But _this_ – such a small thing, when Harry hands him the saucer of his perfect tea – this breaks Voldemort. “What _are_ you?” he snarls. “And how long have you been watching?”

“Guess. A good guess,” Harry says encouragingly, as though he’s a professor coaxing a reluctant student. “There’s no penalty for getting it wrong.”

“Isn’t there?” Voldemort mutters. But then he sits up, studying Harry. “You look no different,” he says. “You still wear my scar.”

“As it’s on my face, I believe it’s _my_ scar actually.”

“The wand was loyal to you because Albus left it to you in his will?”

“Nope.” Harry pops the _p_ , to be obnoxious. Voldemort ignores it.

“You are a Seer,” he says. When Harry hums, he looks irritated. “I am playing your _game._ You will answer me properly.”

“I… have the same skillset as a Seer. But no, not quite.”

“A warlock? A necromancer? Harry,” he says in exasperation, which Harry finds nearly charming, “you were a mediocre student at a mediocre school, and no amount of your exceptionalism would have convinced Albus to teach you the dark arts.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Harry agrees. “But sometimes I go to Durmstrang.”

“You are a time traveler.”

“ _Wellll…._ ”

“A necromantic time traveler? Those are two distinct fields, and any expert practitioners in either are at least a hundred years old. But.” He peers into his tea for a moment. “You said Death itself was irritated with me.”

“ _Her_ self, and yeah, she is. Can you blame her?”

“You said we’ve both died countless times.”

“Yeah. I’ve only found it a mild inconvenience. Sometimes it even feels rather relaxing. Everything just _stops_ for awhile.”

“We are both immortal,” Voldemort says slowly, “thus transgressing the natural law. And it is your punishment to be my guardian, and my punishment to be… your charge.”

Harry laughs, even though Voldemort isn’t trying to be funny. “Sure, yeah. That’s near enough, anyway.”

“I played your _bloody_ guessing game.”

“You did. Here.” He’s getting up, approaching the bookshelf. It is rather shit, he agrees – he’d had Hermione’s Muggle bookshelf in mind from the timeline in which she taught Muggle Studies (Harry thought it was a waste of her brilliance, but what did he know), so there’s Muggle classics along with wizarding children’s books for her kids. His eye immediately lands on the book he wants.

“Just the last one,” he says, handing Beedle the Bard to Voldemort. “Unless you’d like me to read it to you?”

Voldemort takes it, albeit doubtfully. “A fairy tale?”

“They’re all true in one way or another. I’m going to see what’s haunting your tower.” He turns on his heel.

He wanders the tower for a bit. There are noises in the pipes, and long shadows where the narrow windows don’t light entire corridors. The tower has populated itself with non-essential décor, tapestries and reliefs and a few portraits. “Do you talk?” he asks the painted little girl in Victorian garb.

“No,” she says, and then ducks her face into her hair, giggling.

“Well. Don’t tell him anything helpful.” He follows the sound of scurrying to the top floor. He hears them distinctly, the rattle of tiny bones in the rafters. “Come here,” he sighs, holding out his arm, and with a resentful whistle a tiny skeletal bird perches on his wrist. “All of you.” Two more birds, and then a rat skeleton scurries forward. “You are lost,” he tells the animals with exasperation. “This dimension was supposed to be empty.”

The birds sing reproachfully, and Harry gets the gist: Harry creates out of death. It’s like trying to keep Atlantis from getting a bit wet. “And you?” he addresses the rat. It has nothing to say for itself. “Right. Well. There are far nicer dimensions for you all to occupy.”

“You speak the abyssal language,” Voldemort’s voice says behind him.

 _Yes, but not very well_. He doesn’t say this: Death told him that people rarely find his self-deprecating moments endearing now that he’s meant to hold together the fabric of the universe. They just find it alarming. But it’s true: he’s not yet fluent enough to rouse the daemons with a great victory speech. Sometimes he mixes up verb tenses and the daemons snicker behind his back. “I do.”

Voldemort is standing in the doorway, looking not even slightly abashed at the eavesdropping. “Because you amassed all three Hallows.” He is holding _Beedle the Bard_ to his chest, pale fingers discordant against the cheery tan-gold cover. “And Death made you a guardian.”

“Yeah. Can I leave them here?” he asks, holding out his armful of skeletal birds. “They say they don’t want to go.”

Irritation slashes through Voldemort’s features. He wants praise, he wants to be told he is correct and so exceptionally clever. “The Master of Death,” Harry relents. “The Vanquisher, the Challenger, the Time-Crosser, the Builder. Sometimes even the Guardian, as you say.”

Voldemort clearly _loves_ this, that one so singular and significant as Harry is spending time on him. Bloody narcissist. “The Master of Death,” he muses. “And yet you spend so much time in our realm.”

“Time,” Harry says with a laugh, “is not particularly in demand for us.”

“You would have known of the Horcruxes?” Voldemort asks. “I – was not alone at their creation.”

Yeah, Harry had probably sent a few daemons to watch over the Horcruxes. He will need to ask _precisely_ what Voldemort did with the Horcruxes at some point, but not now.

“Or were you there to stop me?” Voldemort goes on, still so pleased. “To the end that I’d eliminate the Mudbloods and purify our race, _death_ is my tool as well. Or was it the armies of Inferi to which you’d object?”

“Not really. I mean, it’s not _great_ , but it’s not my job to stop you.”

A flicker of annoyance. “Certainly it is.”

“Nope!” Again he pops the _p_. And then he’s moving past Voldemort, heading downstairs. He wants another biscuit.

“ _Potter_.” And since Voldemort can’t or won’t do magic to stop him, instead he hurls the book at Harry’s head.

“Tom Marvolo Riddle,” Harry admonishes, whirling around. “Abso _lute_ ly not. We do not throw things in this home.” He’s mimicking Ron’s tone from the lifetimes in which he’s a stay at home dad. “Give me your hand,” he says, and raps the elder wand sharply across Voldemort’s knuckles.

Voldemort is bewildered first, and angry second. “Is this my punishment?” he asks, pulling his bruised hand out of Harry’s grasp. “This… insanity, I’m meant to entertain it?”

“No. Merely a side effect.” He levitates _Beedle the Bard_ up to the skeletal birds; they take it away for him.

Back into the makeshift library. He finds that Voldemort shoved over a stack of romance novels in his frustration. (Those books were also Hermione’s. She said Harry had no right to judge media written by and for women’s pleasure, and he quite agreed.) He charms their tea hot again.

“This is absurd,” Voldemort breathes when he enters. “Of course it would be you, it’s _always_ been you. But I assumed you would be a more… moralistic presence.”

“Oh.” Harry makes a face. “I can, if you want. Ghost of Christmas past? Halloween past,” he amends. “Hey, actually….” He lifts the elder wand, and charms the house full with Halloween décor. A jack-o-lantern leers at them from atop the bookshelf. “Now the birds _really_ have got to stay. They’re part of the decorations.”

“This is not happening,” Voldemort insists, to himself really. “Just… deliver me to Hades. I expected nothing less.”

“Oh no, Hades doesn’t get out of bed before noon. Trust me, I’m doing you a favor.”

Voldemort stares at him.

Harry stares back.

It’s probably not best to fuck with Voldemort’s psyche for too long. He’s already half-mad – and with _such_ a small fragment of his soul intact, who could blame him? But he needs to be lucid enough to fix his Horcruxes. Harry vanishes a few skeleton decorations with glowing eyes as a compromise.

“You’re the Master of Death,” Voldemort says, “but you have the ability to manipulate spacetime. If this is in fact its own plane of existence.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Perhaps you should revise your title, then?”

Harry laughs, delighted. “You know, I haven’t really had to explain my job title too often. Well, to a few mortals here and there, but I take those memories and leave a mere _impression_. For example, in your world I announced myself, stole you away, and then made the entire world recall you dying at Hogwarts.”

“I am not dead,” Voldemort says tightly. “I know what _that_ feels like.”

“Ah, yeah, I know all about your dispossession. I had a few daemons who wanted to eat you then.”

Voldemort’s face contorts magnificently, but he doesn’t argue the point.

“I guess I will have to explain a bit, before telling you what I need from you.” When Voldemort looks interested, Harry revises: “For a certain definition of _need_.”

“This is temporary.”

“Quite.”

“And then you’ll kill me?”

He said it more steadily than Harry might have expected him to. This man, more pathologically afraid of death than nearly anyone Harry had ever met – now having tea with the Master of Death and doing quite well, all things considered. “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Harry says. “But sure, I could give it a go.” And even though he flashes Voldemort a charming smile to make clear he’s joking, Voldemort remains uncharmed.

“Then what do you _need_?” He pronounces the word like a shard of glass.

“Your Horcruxes are fucking up my work.” Fucking up his _power_ , more like, but Voldemort is already too pleased with himself.

“Ah. I suppose they would.”

“Yeah?” Harry raises his eyebrows.

“To preserve my past selves – Every text speaks of it as a _crime against nature_.” He says the phrase almost fondly. “It must also be a violence against time.”

“Hm.”  He eats another biscuit. He’d thought through that much on his own. Could he talk this out with Voldemort and then wipe his memories? He works better when he is thinking aloud, and the job of Master of Death is, unsurprisingly, profoundly isolating.

“Have you brought them with you?” Voldemort is curious, engaged. Harry knew it even from their previous encounters – Voldemort was a giant _slut_ for knowledge. He could be made amenable to quite a lot, if there was esotera or secrets within.

“No, I haven’t,” he says, wondering if he should pop back into another realm to pick them up real quick. “Oh,” he adds with a laugh. “Only the one, I suppose.” And he twists his hand before him, and the signet ring bursts onto his middle finger.

Voldemort bristles. “Why do you have _that_ one?”

“It’s a really funny story…. Sooo you know the resurrection stone?”

And before he gets any further Voldemort is up, one hand grasping Harry’s throat and the other clawing at the ring. “It – is – mine,” he hisses in a deadly tone, his nails biting into Harry’s flesh. “It is mine and you’ve no right to it – “ He’s pulled Harry up and shoved him against a bookshelf, rocking it back precariously. “You’ve got no right to your position, if it is predicated on theft. I will _kill_ you for them – “

And Harry wrenches his robes out of Voldemort’s grasp and vanishes off his dimension.

 

Well. They’d been doing quite well for awhile. Harry had returned to the interstitial space, high in the mountains. After straightening his robes, he begins to laugh.

 _Goddammit_. That might be it. A Horcrux and a Hallow, stolen property with conflicting loyalties…. He watches it glint in the weak sunlight he’s chosen for today’s sky. Apart from the Horcrux within Harry himself (which has posed fewer problems than one might expect, yet), it’s probably the most existentially complicated one.

Anyway, it’s that same timeline that is corrupting now. That world has labored for a month in the belief that Voldemort is dead; it’s going to intersect with the ‘Voldemort is actually dead’ timeline if he leaves it much longer. So. He returns.

And then it really is June 2, 1998 in a meaningful sense of the date. Kingsley is Minister, and Andromeda Deputy, and the Death Eaters imprisoned, and Snape exonerated by a deathbed confession that was not his deathbed after all. He is _very_ irritated at his hero status in this post-war world. Harry wants to stop in on him sometime just to bask in his ire.

But for now, Harry dips into the point in the day in which he’s meant to be working in the Department of Mysteries. He can feel the hum of the prophecies and the veil and all the isolated bits of time shoved in artifacts (the time turners are more elegant, but he really wants to nick the egg-bird timelapse; it’d make a great paperweight). But right now Robards is standing before him, watching him fiddle with Slytherin’s locket – a souvenir they gave him in this world. And Harry hears himself saying something about the magic of a mother’s sacrifice or whatever. “I could ask him,” he offers casually, “if he ever found any sacrificial magic on it.”

It only takes a single detail for the false memories to fall away. “Yes, yes.” Robards is stroking his beard. “It still makes everyone nervous you won’t bring an Auror in with you.” Because now the entire world remembers highly classified decisions made about Voldemort’s imprisonment, nobody knows quite where he’s kept, it’s above their head and really, he might as well rot wherever he is anyway.

“I know.” Harry gives him a charming smile. “I don’t mean to cause trouble.”

“As though you could do otherwise.” He scrubs his beard more forcefully. “Is he talking?”

Is Voldemort talking. What did Robards think he would say? Harry makes a vague gesture. “You know. He will.”

“Excellent.” And Robards wanders out, and Harry is left with the locket in his hands.

He has tried to speak with the Horcruxes before. He’s tried to _befriend_ them before, at one point. The older ones, Nagini and the diadem, at least recognized the magnitude of Harry’s work. The younger ones still had the air of Head Boy, they wanted to control or chastise Harry. So.

He even tried collecting the Horcruxes of each timeline for awhile. It was mind-numbing, and it hadn’t even worked.

He gets up and wanders into the death chamber. (Technically heavily guarded but not against Harry.) Harry pulls the wispy veil aside.

It is a quiet place. It’s as near to an afterlife as they properly have. The land of the lost souls. Every person has an essence, something consistent and connected across timelines. As they die in a timeline, their essence is consolidated. And when they are lost to every timeline, they arrive here.

It _hurts_ to have lost Sirius through the veil – and Harry’s not hurt by much, these days. He would be dead, disappeared, forgotten in every other world Harry visits. But he tells Sirius it is fine, that it would hurt him to try to reinstate him from the land of the Veil. Sirius looks healthier than he did in Azkaban. He looks more peaceful.

Some souls gather near the opened veil, curious. Harry wonders if he could just drop the Horcruxes – the _real_ Horcruxes, whatever that means – into this nothingness. Maybe he should just banish Voldemort himself here. But he knows it’d cause more problems than it would solve.

He lets the veil drop closed behind him. This world isn’t actually greyscale, but it feels that way. The souls are deteriorating into dust, iridescent dust that hangs in the air. “I need to take a walk,” he mutters to the souls gently pulling on his robes, tasting the power of his magic. They are not small, but they are a bit hunched, shuffling through the iridescent dirt with their eyes on the ground. Depending how long they’ve been here, their distinguishing features have worn away, and it’s hard to tell their gender or ethnicity or age. Not that those still matter. He goes with the Forgotten to an imposing stone labyrinth, standing in a low valley. He never makes it to the center before he’s untangled his thoughts.

 

III.

Another month, measured by that timeline. He’s traveling from another anomaly. He’d healed Grindelwald’s wormhole bullshit – which feels quite partisan, as he’s not invested in whether Grindelwald wins or loses in any particular timeline, and it’s about equal anyway. But this time he is coming from a dimension ruled by a lich, intent on feeding off spacetime like an undead black hole. It was impressive and gross, all at once. At least he had style.

Anyway, the lich is given a stern talking-to, Harry puts some particularly solid barriers around his own dimension, and they were good. Now.

When he arrives in Voldemort’s dimension, he sort of does a double take: the tower is now blocky and grey, a perfect facsimile of the orphanage except where the wrought iron _Wool’s_ sign would stand, there’s a sign instead reading _Potter’s_. Brilliant. Fucking brilliant.

The skeleton birds seem to have reproduced, as more of them soar overhead now. One perches on Harry’s shoulder and whistles a warning that Voldemort is furious and he’s got a knife.

“He’s got a _knife_?” Harry repeats incredulously. Well. It had been awhile since he’d been stabbed. Nothing like a bit of violence to break up his day.

When he enters – it’s the orphanage. He nearly expects to find Mrs. Cole peering around a corner. (“She died in my fourth year,” diadem-Tom had told Harry once. “They said she had worked herself to death out of love for us, but it was clearly cirrhosis.”) The Halloween decorations still hang on the walls, the only splash of color in this ruthlessly functional building. Harry takes the stairs.

Voldemort, like the fucking drama queen he is, is lying on the bed that was his in childhood. There’s a few wine bottles on the desk, along with some books. “What arsehole did this?” Harry asks lightly, because he faintly recalls twisting this dimension into something worse as he fled last time. This is _inspired_ , though.

Voldemort glares. “Petty,” he pronounces. “You spiteful, petty _child_.”

“God, I wish,” Harry says. He hasn’t felt like a child in such a long time. Child _ish_ , yes, but that was different, wasn’t it. He presents himself to Voldemort as a seventeen year old because that is how Voldemort knows him, is all. Actually, he and Voldemort always fight when Harry is young. His ‘oldest’ victory is only at the age of twenty-four. It’s quite unsporting of Voldemort, to pick a mortal enemy with a half century disadvantage.

“Put the tower back.” Voldemort’s tone is venom.

“You can’t do it yourself?” Harry is only curious. “You’ve really got a lot of autonomy over this dimension. Why not, right?”

Voldemort has risen by now, imperious and intimidating. “As I’m sure your _birds_ have told you, it will always revert.”

“Huh. Wonder why.”

( _Please at least try to inspire people’s confidence_ , Death is not there to chide him.)

Anyway, Voldemort is glaring at him. “Put it back,” he demands.

So Harry shrugs, pulling out his wand. “Something a little more domestic?” he suggests, and transforms the building into the home in Godric’s Hollow.

When Voldemort shoves Harry up against a wall, his only thought is that he sort of provoked this. And when Voldemort has pulled a knife from his sleeve, plunging it into Harry’s solar plexus and casting Imperio _through the blade_ , Harry is surprised how good metal is as a conductor for magic. That’s it. He doesn’t even bleed. It must be hideously unsatisfying.

“ _What – have – you – done_.” _Stab, stab, stab_. Voldemort’s face is contorted and inhuman, a mask of fury. Harry can’t stop looking at it.

Voldemort withdraws the blade from Harry’s liver – where his liver would be, anyway – and presses the tip into the hollow of his throat. “You are a thief,” he hisses. Parseltongue, he lapses into Parseltongue when he’s angry. “A thief, and a charlatan, and an impetuous _child_. I will kill you, I will find a way. We’ve got eternity.”

“ _I’ve_ got eternity,” Harry corrects. “You’ve got – well, I dunno, but an era less with every tantrum like this.” He pushes the knife away. It’s not like he’s new at handling people who are taking their own deaths badly. Really, that’s all he gets, the ones acting out when Death attempts to collect them. So let’s call this visit _anger_. Had last month been denial? Voldemort might be too self-confident to even deal in denial, he decides.

They are standing in Harry’s nursery – technically it’s the version of Godric’s Hollow in which Lily raised him as a single mum, that she and James never married, so all the décor is her taste alone. Harry likes that timeline. Anyway, he’s moving past Voldemort, bringing him downstairs.

“You haven’t answered me. _Give me back my ring_.” Voldemort storms after him. He’s still clutching the knife.

“It’s an interesting question,” Harry agrees. “What counts as possession? The elder wand’s got specific rules for who actually owns it, yeah? Can’t just steal it. – Or didn’t you know?” he asks, glancing back. “I forget what you find out in each timeline. In some of them you even know about the Hallows already. You come across them in your typical immortality bibliography.”

Voldemort glares. “You came to battle already knowing the elder wand obeys you.”

“Well, _yeah_. What, you think I wanted a fair fight? – Wine or tea?” he asks. “Or there’s whiskey too, I think.” He’s pulling open a cabinet. “And rumple minze, but that’s from a _very_ bad Yule this one time….”

“Whiskey.”

“Brilliant.” He moves through this kitchen easily. It’s warm, he quite likes it. Voldemort still clutches the knife as though it’s all he has. It’s really quite pathetic. “Here,” Harry says, setting the whiskey on the table. “Give me that.”

Voldemort holds the knife out reluctantly, and Harry doesn’t even take it properly but only transfigures it into a wand. “Not yew,” he says. “Cypress. For mourning.”

“I am not in mourning.”

“You should be,” Harry says rather firmly. He sinks into a kitchen chair. “Your Horcruxes don’t stay where they should. Or more specifically, _when_ they should. But you see, every when is a where – “

“I understand that,” Voldemort snaps.

“Good. Good. Please sit down. I don’t mind that you stabbed me. Even if you’re obviously not going to apologize for it.”

Voldemort pulls out the other chair a bit jerkily. “You don’t also know how I take my whiskey?” he mutters, casting a sphere of ice into the glass.

“We only drank tea together in the timelines where I spent time among the Death Eaters. Not as _myself_ ,” he adds, when Voldemort gives him a hard look. “And your timeline wasn’t one of them. But there was one timeline when the other Horcruxes were _incredibly_ attracted to Nagini, they kept showing up there, so I had to be nearby. They’re not big anomalies, but that made it all the more annoying. I found her wearing the diadem once.”

Voldemort blinks at him. Come on, that is funny, dammit, laugh. But instead he says, “There is nothing about Horcruxes that should make them so – unstable.”

“Mm.” Harry drinks. “Once the locket ended up back around your mum’s neck the night she’d give birth to you. _That_ was a mess.”

“You alter the timelines, then.”

“No. I’m just a fixer. The custodian of time,” Harry says. “I guess I could… try?”

“You could have saved her.” He says it flatly.

“Well. No. Technically? But it’d just cause more ripples that would go _more_ wrong, I’d have to destroy that timeline in the end. She needs to be alive in the dimensions she was alive, and dead in the dimensions she was meant to be dead.” (This is probably callous, but Harry’s entire existence is death by now. In fact, a few skeletal mice area playing at their feet, happy that Harry has rejoined them today.) Since Voldemort won’t ask the obvious question, Harry generously continues: “It made… some difference, maybe. But there was always the prophecy.”

“I see.” He pours more whiskey. “Take me to see one of these anomalies.”

“… Sure.”

Voldemort glares. “Was that not already your plan?”

“I dunno. I was keeping track of how the Horcruxes have been, with you taken out of time. They’re still restless.” Most recently he had to rescue the diary from Tom Riddle’s wardrobe a few years early, in a dimension quite close to Voldemort’s own. “It’s not a problem other people’s Horcruxes have caused. Then again, nobody else has made so bloody many of them.”

Voldemort’s gaze brightens. “Ever?”

Harry rolls his eyes. “It’s not an _accomplishment_ , don’t look so chuffed. I’ve sequestered liches nearer to life than you.”

“It _is_ an accomplishment. All of the texts only speak of a single division.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve massively buggered something up. Your own soul’s the least of it.”

Voldemort is placated for the first time since Harry’s arrival. This arrogant git.

“When you cast the Horcruxes,” Harry goes on, “did anything go wrong?”

“No.”

“ _Tom_ ,” he says, sweet and indulgent. “It’s okay if it did.”

“They were flawless. Each of them.”

Harry would go down the checklist, but they both already know it: runes, focusing crystals, Greek incantations, and sucking the victim’s soul from their body while it’s still warm. Harry has seen some Horcrux attempts fucked _entirely_ up, but Voldemort is nothing if not perfect.

Still, his soul is scattered all over space and time, like the explosion of a star. It’d be beautiful if it weren’t horrifying. It’s depriving Death of one of her citizens. She has accused Harry of stalling.

And – maybe. Voldemort feels like _Harry’s_ in some fundamental way. Maybe they were only soulmates, literal soulmates, in those earthbound timelines, but Harry still feels a connection. In spite of the countless murders, attempted murders, and the stabbing not a half hour ago. “I can take you to a Horcrux,” he says. “Now, if you’d like.”

“Yes.” He pushes away his glass.

It’s a feeling deep in Harry’s gut, when time is misplaced. A sort of nagging sense, like the beginnings of addiction. Harry is conjuring a traveling cloak, pinning it beneath his chin, swallowing his whiskey. He stands.

Obviously Harry can travel from literally anywhere, but he prefers to step outside to go. When he does, a flock of skeletal birds swoops low, emitting thin whistles from the remains of their beaks. “Atrocious,” Voldemort mutters behind him, swatting a bird off his shoulder.

“They’re cute,” Harry says. “Anyway, when have you ever objected to dead things?” Voldemort doesn’t answer this. “Fine. Here.” He offers his arm, as though apparating. Voldemort takes it.

They arrive inside the girls’ bathroom at Hogwarts, Myrtle’s body still warm before them. In her hand she grasps Hufflepuff’s chalice, a dark liquid spilling from it onto the stone.

“Fuck,” Harry sighs. He can hear the basilisk deeper in the open chamber, telling Tom that there was a human, a human making awful noises, but she is quiet now. “So it’s like this,” Harry says to Voldemort, stooping to pry Myrtle’s fingers open before they rictus. “Horcruxes showing up where they’re not meant to. We’ve got to take _this_ ,” he’s conjuring a cloth to clean the sludgy liquid out of the cup, “back to Hepzibah Smith, until you’ll see it again in a few years.”

But Voldemort is approaching the sink. “I need to see the basilisk.”

“Give her a minute, she’ll be back.”

And so they are – the basilisk, a cloth tied around her eyes this time, and Tom climbing a conjured staircase behind her. “Oh,” Tom breathes when he sees Myrtle. It would be easy to assume Tom would be a cool, calculating killer, but at this point he’s not, he’s still a kid who’s – well, _made a mistake_ is understating it, but he’s a kid who’s caught up in more drama than he’d hoped for. He is in shock, pale and laughing and struggling for coherent words for a moment. “Guard this room,” he says to the basilisk. “I need….” And without fully explaining himself, he strides out. When he passes Harry, Harry can see the sheen of perspiration across his chiseled features.

He’ll need the ritual elements. He’s probably sprinting to the dungeons now. It’s really quite a narrow timeframe.

Voldemort has stepped close to the basilisk, his hand hovering over her plumage. “Here,” Harry says, and he makes them slightly more corporeal so Voldemort can pet her. She inhales, finds his scent familiar, and doesn’t question it. Harry will have to take her memory of this before Tom returns, but for now he leaves it.

“This is not – my timeline,” Voldemort says, his hand still on the basilisk’s feathers.

“No, it’s not. How’d you know?”

“I never wore my hair so long.”

Oh, yeah – this version of Tom had his hair longer, tied at the nape of his neck. “You grew up in a magical – group home? foster home? – in this timeline. You weren’t the only kid orphaned between the wars,” he shrugs. “So you never had to pass for Muggle, you know.”

“I grew up knowing of magic.”

“Uh-huh.” When Voldemort says nothing more, Harry goes on. “Maybe it helped. But you still end up, y’know, here. And I still defeat you.”

“It is my fate, then.”

“Yeah.”

“And yet you find it – acceptable, to prosecute me for the person I must become,” Voldemort says, bitter.

Harry no longer believes in choice, not in the way Dumbledore once spoke of it. There are larger forces at play. “Yeah,” he says again. It’s not the time for this argument.

Harry cleans up the bits of this anomaly before Tom re-enters. “Thank you,” Tom says to the basilisk, running a hand over her head as Voldemort had just done. It’s rather… sweet. And then, with shaking hands, he is pulling out the ritual elements for the Horcrux. He spills the salt over the floor twice before he draws an adequate circle. The crystals glow brightly. Tom kneels.

And Harry and Voldemort watch, but it is flawless. He must have practiced for this – for killing his father next month, even if Myrtle was not part of the plan. His Greek is fluid and melodic. At last he bends, sucking at Myrtle’s mouth to detach her dying soul. A flickering ball of light clings to his lips; with his wand, he detaches it and drops it onto his diary.

Nothing goes wrong. Tom vanishes the salt and crystals, and casts a dozen innocuous spells on his wand before casting the healing spells one would expect to find from a prefect. He steps over Myrtle to fetch a professor.

And Harry pulls Voldemort away, landing else-when before Madam Smith’s home. “I haven’t had to take a Horcrux from the creation of another before,” he says he lets them in. “That was new.”

“It went perfectly,” Voldemort says, defensive.

“Yeah.” To the locked cabinet, Harry pulling out the cushioned box where the cup must reside for the next six years. There.

“It’s happening more often,” Harry says when he has rejoined Voldemort. “I mean, as much as time means anything.” The feeling in his stomach has settled, now that everything is in its proper time again. “So, I dunno.”

“I need a library. A proper one. Durmstrang’s would suffice.” Voldemort is shredding the newly-blossoming sweet pea flowers off Hepzibah’s bushes. He is restless, but intrigued.

Harry gives him a dubious look. “There’s nothing in this for you.”

“Isn’t there?” He is suddenly pliant and charming, just as Hepzibah knew him. “It is _my_ soul, after all. Perhaps I can make your work a bit easier.”

“You’re not going to find any magic to help you escape, in any library.”

“No,” he agrees. “But it will pass the time.”

Harry is much less unnerved by furious murderous Voldemort than he is by sweet disarming Voldemort. Anyway, fine. It will give Voldemort something to focus on besides drinking and chucking the romance novels at the birds when they try to perch too close to him.

Harry drops Voldemort off in his own dimension. Voldemort says nothing as they re-enter the home, and then Harry is casting a facsimile of Durmstrang’s library where the back door used to lead off the dining room. He should probably curate the collection, but – really, Voldemort could not do much damage in this world.

He is about to let himself out when Voldemort approaches from behind. “Harry.”

“What?” He turns, to find Voldemort much too close.

“I only wondered – whether _your_ Horcrux still resides within you.” And before Harry can answer, Voldemort has pushed him against the door, crushing their mouths together, pushing past Harry’s teeth and tongue to _suck_ as Tom had earlier. Harry’s soul stirs. His Horcrux, _their_ Horcrux, is ignited with the contact.

And then Harry shoves him off. “Git,” he says, laughing as he’s wiping his mouth. “Presumptuous git. You’re a bit past charming people with your good looks, aren’t you?” Though he doesn’t even think it’s _that_. Voldemort had intended to fluster him, but Harry is no longer an awkward seventeen year old. He just looks like one.

But then there’s the reality that yes, Harry is still imbued with the Horcrux. He’d avoided acknowledging it, generally. As many timelines as it’d been destroyed, it still persists within him. In _that_ timeline, the one from which he’d taken Voldemort, the Horcrux was supposed to be destroyed in the Forest when Harry offered himself up to die. And yet, it pulses within him now. Something about Harry James Potter, the Master of Death, inherently clings to the Horcrux.

“You couldn’t destroy me,” Voldemort says. “Not as long as it exists.” He is – pleased? Surprised? Satisfied? His gaze is bright and intent.

“ _Destroy_ you?” Harry echoes. “When’ve I ever threatened to destroy you? God, it’d probably be a more fitting punishment to leave you here for eternity, until you grasp what immortality _actually_ entails.”

“You are squandering it.”

He only rolls his eyes. “You will never be powerful again,” he says firmly. “It’s probably best to stop wanting it.”

“Perhaps.”

“Really.” He can’t yet put into words how _horrifying_ immortality itself is, the fundamental disconnect from the rest of existence. He could hardly warn Voldemort about it. But power, they all know the downfalls of power. It really doesn’t matter, in any case.

So he lets himself out, walking a good distance into the glass garden before he steps from this plane. After a day that begins in a stabbing and ends in a kiss, he deserves to lie down for a bit.

 

He does not get to lie down. When he returns to the interstitial space, his mother is waiting for him.

Lily Evans Potter is the form of Death, in Harry’s reign. She is bright and forceful and – well, _cool_ , for being essentially the Grim Reaper. The daemons adore her. Harry only half-thinks of her as his mother anymore – there are very few timelines when he grows up with her, so they mostly know each other from this time beyond time. Death takes an appropriate form for each Master of Death, so – Lily would always be Harry’s savior and companion in death.

(If Hermione knew, she’d huff that it was patriarchal bullshit for a woman to be subordinate to her son, and she would be right. But generally Harry feels like Lily’s got more of a grasp on things than he does.)

“You’ve been with him,” Lily says when Harry approaches the stream where she’s waiting. Some daemons, ugly-cute babies with features of goats or hogs or swans, splash at her feet.

“I had to. He’ll go mad if I leave him alone for too long.” Harry pulls off his shoes (classic red high top Converse, because he can) and sits on a stone opposite, letting the daemons splash his legs. “And he may know something. He’d know more than the rest of the world, anyway.”

Their work is lonely. Their existence is lonely. They’ve talked about it before, that they didn’t begrudge some non-essential time spent among mortals, just because. But Voldemort. Harry knows that Lily finds him dangerous. He may still be.

“You showed him Myrtle Warren.”

“She had the cup.”

“That’s new, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. So we took it. Gave the basilisk a good pat on the head. And then returned the cup to its rightful place.” (In abyssal, the language they currently speak, _a thing’s rightful place_ has its own word. These hell languages could be rather sweet.) “Why, was Warren alright?”

“She fought as much as always. Another ghost.” Lily did not like ghosts. She thought of them as a personal failure. “She did recall holding the cup.”

“Shit, sorry. I never remember to take the memories of the dead.” He rolls the bottom of his jeans higher, submerging his calves.

“She said it spoke to her.”

If the Horcrux possessed Myrtle – well, it’d be an anomaly he’d never seen before, anyway. A significant lapse from the nearest timelines. “Huh.”

“ _Huh_ ,” Lily echoes, teasing. “You’ve still got no ideas, then?”

“Nah. But I will.” For now he didn’t need to tell her of Voldemort’s library. Voldemort could prove himself in good time.

 

Harry dips back into the timeline from whence he took Voldemort. In this world, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny have all got Ministry jobs – Hermione has an internship with the Wizengamot, Ron’s in Magical Games and Sports, and Ginny’s just begun Auror training. They have coordinated lunch hours once a week, so they are eating together in the Ministry canteen now. “Look at this,” Ginny is saying, pulling the neckline of her robes to reveal a bruise along her collarbone. “Tonks! And she said she’s not sorry. Said we’ve got to be broken down before we can be built back up.”

“That isn’t true,” Hermione objects. “Psychologically, that is. It’s just hazing.”

“I’d rather get hazed with a few curses than with a thousand hours of research no one will ever read,” Ginny says, nodding to Hermione’s stuffed-full attaché case.

“Oh, right. Harry, this is for you.” She’s reaching back, pulling out a leather portfolio. “The legal precedents for defining love.”

Harry had asked for this, or Hermione recalled him asking for it at least. “Worse than explaining a joke,” Ron mutters, leaning in to read over Harry’s shoulder as he flips through the pages. “The legal definition of love. It’s the least romantic thing.”

Harry quite agrees. Love… well, it doesn’t figure prominently into the rules of spacetime as he knows them, but it’s there. Time loops are often caused by an excess of feeling about another, and we may as well call that love. Or people, with good intentions typically, pursuing immortality to stay together with their partners for longer – the last one he’d had to stop was a wizard who’d married a Muggle woman, and Harry had quite agreed that the difference in lifespan was a tragedy. And then there was the resurrection stone itself, forged by love and bereavement. Harry fiddles with the ring at his finger – though he’d transfigured the stone into a deep red ruby and told everyone it was his birthstone, which is quite a good joke but they didn’t get it, and Lily refused to laugh at it either. So. Love. It is Voldemort’s opposite, the Horcruxes’ opposite, and he is curious if not optimistic that it may provide some direction.

“It’s fascinating work, really,” Hermione is saying. “I would come across the question of whether love is a possible tool for rehabilitation. And whether it’s an ethical one, if it is possible. You couldn’t just force love on someone. Could you?” she asks Harry.

“Yeah, ‘cause Harry wants to hug Voldemort good again,” Ron scoffs.

Harry smiles. He will never not be gratified when Ron’s offhand remarks are nearer to true than he’d know. “Maybe,” he says. “But we’d probably start with someone with a better chance of success.”

While he’d only asked for the Department of Mysteries job to stay near the veil and have access to some esoteric texts, some of the research there _is_ exciting to him. He’s really not as omniscient as one might expect the Master of Death to be, so sometimes they are proposing something new to him, and other times it’s just… _cute_ to watch them get so excited about a Moebius time loop or the bits of string theory they know of so far.

Anyway. Hugging Voldemort back to good. He may as well try.

 

The papers don’t have anything directly helpful, but they give him a few directions _not_ to go at least. The Unspeakables in his department are really quite unromantic types – one of them says to Harry that it’s like how chefs never cook at home, that work exhausts their interest. So they’re trying to dismantle love as efficiently as possible, to write down in chemicals or runes or theoretical physics exactly the force that becomes love.

Every so often Harry wanders through the spacetime department. Just to see. They are cute.

 

IV.

He ends up back in Voldemort’s dimension again sooner than a month later. There is something wrong.

He hasn’t escaped, at least. Harry knows that from – well, from the Horcrux, the way it sits in his chest as though the other end is tied to something heavy. He’d never noticed it in the moments Voldemort was trying to murder him. But Voldemort is out beyond the house (still the house of Godric’s Hollow, still decorated in orange and purple Halloween décor, still filled with skeletal mice and birds). He walks into the glass fields beyond.

It’s a good guess on Voldemort’s part, anyway – the fabric of a dimension becomes less solid, farther out. He walks through a forest made of mottled purple-red glass, to a clearing where bright blue liquid glass swirls in a pond. He wonders if it’s driven Voldemort mad – madder – to be trapped alone in a world that is only half-real.

But where the dimension begins to thin, that’s where he finds Voldemort, sitting on the ground surrounded by gutted books. “What are you doing?” Harry says, conjuring a log to sit on.

Voldemort doesn’t seem surprised to see him there. He’s certainly not abashed. But it does look like an escape attempt. “It hasn’t been a month.”

“No. It’s hasn’t.” There are strands, filaments of this dimension, visible beneath the glass ground. With the wand that Harry had given him, Voldemort is carefully moving them apart. “You’re not going to stop?” Harry asks, amused.

“Have you got my Horcruxes?”

“Only the ring.”

This time Voldemort grits his teeth but doesn’t stab Harry, so – progress? “Yes. _My_ ring.”

“There’s – look. I don’t know why it’s not _your_ ring any longer, but it’s not. Otherwise maybe you’d have this bloody job. I don’t entirely understand why the Horcruxes do what they do at all. I’m trying. That’s why I’m here.”

Voldemort’s gaze is cool on his own. “You do not inspire much confidence in your position.”

“I know,” Harry sighs. “Not as though anyone could sack me.”

“No?” And while Harry had meant it as an offhand remark, Voldemort actually seems intrigued. “You’ll hold the job forever, then.”

“You know that _forever_ doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“What if you are negligent?”

“Only if I’m negligent enough to lose the Hallows.” He gives Voldemort a wry look. “You still can’t have them. You’re not subtle.”

“You seem lonely,” Voldemort says instead.

“Do I?”

“You are here.”

“Yeah, well, you’re fucking something up. What _is_ this, by the way?”

Voldemort reaches into a break in the glass, plucks a string, breaks it. The faint scene below shimmers and changes. “I am seeking the cord that ties the Horcruxes together.”

“… Huh.” It’s not a bad idea. Voldemort could absolutely not accomplish it on his own, though.

Voldemort looks up, magic still clinging to his fingers like spiderwebs. “You don’t have a more interesting response?”

“You’re going to break a lot of timelines, if you do manage to tie them together.”

A rise and fall of his shoulders. “You’ll restore them.”

Harry makes a doubtful noise. Would he? _Could_ he, more significantly. If anything gets too broken, he could just erase that timeline and start over. Anyway, the “butterfly flapping its wings in China” thing was alarmist; Harry has found that most timelines will bounce back to what they should be, given the chance. Except for the bits around the Horcruxes.

“There hasn’t been another anomaly?” Voldemort says, in a way that is only half-question.

“Why would you know that?”

He breaks another string; there’s the vibrating note of hitting another timeline. Each one has a distinct pitch – many more than human ears could hear – and this one sounds like a timeline in which Tom goes on to teach DADA. It will make hiding Horcruxes in the castle far easier.

But Voldemort is peering past the filaments of interstitial space. “Where is it?”

Harry peers in, too. Tom Riddle before the DADA class, looking young and a bit flustered, honestly. He must be new. “The locket’s under your robes,” he says. At Voldemort’s look, he shrugs. “I just know.”

“Do you know where everything is at all times?”

“God, no. That’d be tedious.” He sees the look in Voldemort’s eyes and sighs. “Your Horcruxes are very, very special to me. You’re very special and very clever. Is that what you want to hear?” he asks, with a patronizing pat of Voldemort’s cheek.

He’d expected Voldemort to swat his hand away, but he doesn’t, so Harry’s fingers stay on his face a moment too long.

“Yes,” Voldemort says. “That is precisely what I wanted to hear.” His tone is dispassionate, sincere. He plucks another string and they see Tom slap a hand to his chest, where the locket has just jolted.

“Why did Dumbledore trust me in this world?” Voldemort asks, more curious now.

And Harry makes a face. “You think Dumbledore lets on why he does anything, ever? Sometimes he’s worried you’ll get caught up in worse things outside the castle. Actually, he’s argued against expelling you a few times for that reason, too.”

“How magnanimous.”

“In this world – “ Harry gestures. “You learn to live together. Here.” And he’s pulling open the breach between dimensions, pulling the classroom close, stepping in when it’s near enough.

Tom has notes on banshees on the desk before him – and god, he’s _so_ new at teaching, lecturing too quickly and with too complex ideas for any of his students to follow. Harry can feel the presence of the locket beneath his robes, cold and biting. But then –

Tom takes a breath, braces his hands on his desk as he refers back to his notes.

The diadem clatters onto the desk before him.

It hadn’t come from anywhere, it had just _appeared_ , and now the entire class is staring at it. And Tom is – shocked. He hadn’t made this Horcrux yet in this timeline – he won’t travel to Albania for another six years yet – and yet here it sits before him.

Harry and Voldemort are moving in simultaneously, and damn Voldemort’s long legs, because he reaches it first. He picks it up, and Harry is casting memory and distraction charms furiously, because the class can’t see them but they can sure as shit see the diadem even though they _shouldn’t_ be able to.

And Tom, throwing off Harry’s charm, reaches just beneath the diadem to catch Voldemort’s wrist, and while he must feel misty and unreal in Tom’s grasp, he holds fast. “What are you?” he asks lowly.

“This doesn’t belong here. How did you summon it?”

Parseltongue. Tom’s eyes narrow and he attempts to pull Voldemort toward him, toward the office attached to the classroom. But Harry can’t let this happen, so he’s stepping in, peeling them apart, seizing the diadem from Voldemort’s grasp. “Sorry,” he mutters to Tom, before stealing these few minutes of his memory. Then he’s grabbing Voldemort and pulling them back into his own dimension before they can fuck anything else up.

Voldemort looks dubiously at him as they arrive before the home. No – he’s looking at the diadem. “Surely that belongs back in Albania.”

“Yeah,” Harry agrees, pushing open the front door. “Could I leave it here instead?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.” He moves some miniature pumpkins to set the diadem on the mantle, where it glints as though alive. “You didn’t mean to summon it, then?” he asks, though he already knows.

“No.”

“Me, neither.” He’s sucking his tongue, considering his conundrum. “Want a drink?”

“With you?”

“Who else?” He’s moving to the kitchen, and he can hear Voldemort follow. Really, Voldemort is quite measured and not nearly as mad as Harry’s former prisoners in these circumstances typically are. He’s proud of him. Just give him a puzzle and a library, and that’s him sorted for at least a bit.

“Let’s call it a celebration,” Harry says, and conjures champagne. “Of magic that is new.”

Voldemort side-eyes him. “Magic that is _new_?”

“Magic I haven’t seen before,” Harry clarifies. “It gets monotonous, these timelines that’re all variations on a theme. Thank fuck I haven’t got every detail down, but still.” He’s still considering where the diadem had _come from_ , whether it’s a rip in space or time and why it should appear in Tom Riddle’s classroom of all places. He hands Voldemort a glass. “Cheers.”

Voldemort is quiet, thoughtful. “Do you revert time as well?”

“Uh. I could. It’s sort of obnoxious and broken. Makes plants stop growing, who’d have guessed?”

“If each – _world_ is a variation on a choice, then humans could cross dimensions with time turners. To return to the crossroads, and take the other path.”

Harry has seen the books now stacked around the house; of course Voldemort would now be researching every theory of time that the facsimile-of-Durmstrang’s-library held. “Yeah, they could.”

Irritation crosses Voldemort’s features. “Why do you not find this fascinating?”

 _Because any job becomes boring with time_ , Harry does not say. Because he doesn’t love the theories of magic as Voldemort does. Instead, he shrugs. “Unless there’s, like, immediate consequences, they’re probably too far past it to go back. It’s already a lot that they can go back an hour, I won’t let them discover anything more than that.”

“You won’t _let them_ discover it?”

“I never said I’d play fair.” But Harry’s become blunt to  fault in his isolation, and he can’t wait for Voldemort to reach his actual point any longer. “You want that.” He gestures, though that timeline of course is no particular direction from here. “I don’t blame you, it’s a good life. I mean, until the point where you amass an army out of your students, or when you don’t return from Albania and you learn all your dark magic over there, or you seek me out the Halloween after the prophecy and die then…. But for awhile it’s a good life.”

“Are there any worlds that do not end in my death?” Voldemort asks through gritted teeth. “By mere probability, there should be.”

“Seems the previous Masters of Death weren’t playing fair either.”

“I would do it again.” Voldemort’s set aside the champagne flute, and his gaze is intense on Harry’s. “I would do that life perfectly.”

Harry’s first inclination is to mock Voldemort’s idea of perfection, but he doesn’t because this is – real. Voldemort _could_ do it perfectly, to charm everyone and stay away from the more compelling dark magic, because he values _survival_ above all. Voldemort has never survived before.

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, and he is. “I can’t.”

“You can.”

He shakes his head with a bit of a smile. “It’d cause massive problems for me, for one. But also – the Horcruxes. They won’t just go away. And they’re really….”

“Irreparable damage,” Voldemort says, the words Harry won’t. “Yes. Every book says so.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry says again. He never expected to be discussing redemption, or some magic version of it, with Voldemort here. They drink in silence.

And after Voldemort reaches the bottom of his glass, tipping it back with uncharacteristic bravado, he stands. Into the sitting room, and he returns with the diadem. “Destroy it,” he says shortly, dropping it on the table.

Harry puts a hand on the diadem, stopping its clattering on the wooden surface. “No.”

“Do it, or I shall do it myself.”

“Even if we did – it wouldn’t bring you any closer to mortality.” _Or to goodness_ , Harry doesn’t say. “It’s too late for that.”

“Is it?”

Harry leaves the Horcrux between them, nearly daring Voldemort to cast Fiendfyre or something else reckless. He doesn’t. “I’m leaving you Grindelwald’s library as well,” he says, lifting the elder wand to charm a new niche into the library. “I dunno if there’s anything useful there, but it’s the most complete library on Horcruxes anyway. There are a few timelines where you leave Hogwarts to work for him, did you know that?”

“Why would I know that?”

“Right. You wouldn’t. Anyway, it never goes great, as you’ve got a problem taking orders, but sometimes he teaches you about the Horcruxes. His own interest in them always remained theoretical, thank fuck, but he’s got the knowledge.”

“I see.” His tone is impassive.

Harry swallows the last of his champagne. “I should go.” He nearly apologizes for the intrusion before remembering Voldemort brought it upon himself, tearing holes in this dimension. “ _Do not_ ,” he says, pointing a finger at Voldemort, “try to destroy the Horcrux. It’ll probably heal itself here, just like you will. And I will be very cross with you if you fuck anything up further.”

Voldemort doesn’t acknowledge this. Instead, with all of Riddle’s charm: “Allow me to walk you out.”

“Cheers.”

As Harry leaves, he reflects that he no longer knows quite what he wants from Voldemort. He wonders if Voldemort still knows what he wants from Harry either.

 

V.

The Department of Mysteries doesn’t have much on Horcruxes, they’re still quite esoteric magic. When Harry suggests to the Unspeakable nearest to an expect on the subject that Horcruxes might cause time anomalies, she blinks at him. “What an interesting theory,” she says blandly, making clear that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

He seeks out researchers elsewhere, outside the Ministry and outside Britain and outside this timeline, but none of them are fantastically useful. He visits one timeline, one in which Grindelwald is still alive, to ask him. Grindelwald’s pale gaze looks through him. “Surely it is _your_ Horcrux that has corrupted time.”

Because Grindelwald knows what he is, too. In the early days – inasmuch as there were ‘early’ days – Harry would encounter Grindelwald across time and space. When he first told Grindelwald that the Hallows had been united, the old man had cried and then tried to kill him. It is understandable.

Grindelwald’s expression in this instant isn’t even curious. Of course it’s Harry’s own Horcrux that is ruining everything else. The only Horcrux more unnatural than the resurrection stone is Harry himself. And… he doesn’t know what to do about it.

He reads Hermione’s portfolio on love. He spends time in the space-outside-space, among the tropical birds and daemons and sometimes Lily. He spends more time in the land of the Veil, among the forgotten non-people slowly decaying out of time. He wonders if he could confine Voldemort here. Imprisonment isn’t a proper punishment for Voldemort, but being forgotten would be.

 

If he were more punitive, he would’ve skipped the next ‘official’ visit to Voldemort, three months after his defeat. But Harry is really quite uninterested in punishment, so he goes.

It is a relief, in a way. The only people who know what Harry _is_ are Lily, Grindelwald (in some timelines), and Voldemort. Maybe technically the daemons and the Forgotten. He could tell his friends or anyone else and remove their memories of it afterward, as he’d done with Kingsley, but… taking people’s memories makes him feel emptier than anything in the world. So.

He’s bored of the house at Godric’s Hollow by the time he’s walking up to it. He wants to see Hogwarts again. Voldemort would want to see Hogwarts again too. Perhaps it will awaken something in his cold dead soul.

So the home is rearranging itself as he walks in, and Voldemort looks _very_ unamused. “What is this?”

“… The Great Hall?” It’s a good likeness, with house tables and banners and everything.

“Will you replicate the entire castle?”

“Sure,” he says, though it wasn’t a request. The sloping path toward the dungeons appears before them. “Diadem still intact?” he asks conversationally.

“You already know the answer to that.”

 _Yes, but not for lack of trying_. The memory of Fiendfyre is still embedded in this dimension, which is _stupid_ , because if anything could consume an entire dimension, Fiendfyre could. “Have you always been this reckless?” Harry marvels, striding into the great hall to retrieve the diadem from the mantel of one of its fireplaces. “It’s quite Gryffindor of you.”

“No, I’m not,” Voldemort says, actually needled, and it makes Harry grin. “It was of no consequence, wasn’t it? Nothing here is of any consequence.”

“Oh, don’t fall into existential despair,” Harry pleads. He’s bringing them toward the Slytherin common room. “I can’t have two of us. And I can’t talk anyone out of it. Death is much better at that. Honestly, even the birds here might be better counselors, if you learn to speak a little abyssal.” They pause before the blank wall of the Slytherin common room. “What’s the password?”

Voldemort blinks at him. “This is _your_ creation.”

“Well. Sort of. Let’s say it’s… justice.” The walls slides open. “Perfect.”

This dimension has conjured a duplicate of the Black Lake, and skeletal fish now swim past the windows of the common room. “I got sorted into Slytherin a fair few times,” Harry says conversationally, lighting fire to ward off the damp that forever plagued the dungeons. “Really, it was always a shitshow. The sorting hat never warned me how much of the house would blame me for, y’know, you. And all their families being prosecuted.”

“You’d make a terrible Slytherin.”

“Well, so would you. In this lifetime, I mean. The timelines where you charm your way to world domination are a lot more cunning.”

It’s a peculiar familiarity they’ve got with one another. It makes Harry feels funny to hear from Voldemort that he’d be a shit Slytherin because – well, he’d  heard it from his friends so many times before. And he’s watched Voldemort – and Tom – across timelines, across every high point and low point of all his lives. They were sort-of soulmates; perhaps it is to be expected.

Voldemort is touching things along the common room: the sofas in a study nook, a banner hung above the fireplace, a bust of Merlin set in a niche. Harry gives him a moment alone. Then: “Sooo… the Horcruxes?”

Voldemort looks away from a portrait of an alchemist, currently sleeping. “Yes?”

“They’re still a problem.”

“Mm.”

Harry shoots him an exasperated look. “If you’re not interested anymore, just say so.”

“I am quite interested. I do not yet know how to stabilize them.”

It’s becoming a problem, really. Nagini was killed in a timeline proximate to this one, and Harry didn’t have enough magic to travel there. It’s difficult not to be frustrated with Voldemort, even if he didn’t intend to ruin Harry’s life.

Not this time, anyway.

He’s still carrying the diadem. It really looks no worse for the wear. “What happened?” Harry asks, spinning it around his finger.

“It was not destroyed.”

“No shit. Did it hurt?”

“… Yes.”

Fiendfyre typically only burns itself out after its hunger for a life has been satiated. But the diadem is still alive in his grasp. Discontent and restless, but alive. It would like to be elsewhere, but Harry cannot discern where.

“I think,” he says, dropping the diadem onto his head, “we need to find the time that you created my Horcrux.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s….” _Wrong_ isn’t the word he wants. It’s the most complex. It is accidental. It is the one that persists across time and outside time altogether. “It’s the story that comes next,” is all he says.

“It is not.”

“No?” he asks, playful. “Where would you like to go today, then?”

“Not there.”

If Voldemort were a person typically capable of empathy, Harry would think he were trying to spare him. “I’ve seen it loads of times,” he assures Voldemort. “It really is the most stable commonality among all the timelines. The pins where they all converge.” He offers a crooked smile. “Don’t fuck with Fate.”

“Apparently not.” But his back is tense and he’s clearly unwilling to follow Harry out. Not that it matters. Stepping in, Harry grabs Voldemort’s arm and they step off this plane.

They return to a timeline near to the one from which Voldemort came. James and Lily’s house here is also decorated for Halloween, the curtains enchanted to show silhouettes of ghouls and demons. A trio of jack-o-lanterns are clustered on the front steps. Harry lets them in.

And Voldemort is grasping his wrist now. “This is perverse,” he says lowly. “I couldn’t – “

He looks back, surprised. “What? Why?”

“Because that night fucking _hurt_ ,” Voldemort hisses. “The next twelve years would hurt.”

“Pity,” Harry says. “I thought perhaps this was some _wildly_ delayed remorse.”

“If that is what you’d like me to say, I will.”

“No. Cheers.” He’s bringing them inside. James’s body is already sprawled on the living room floor. Harry has since ceased having feelings about this, really – he is alive in other timelines and so it doesn’t feel like so great a loss that way. Still, something rather ugly twists inside him when Voldemort studies the body for too long. He’s got no right.

Upstairs. They reach the doorway in time to see Voldemort’s robes – _that_ Voldemort, the younger one who has not yet died – swirl into the nursery. There’s a gasp from that Lily. “My son – my boy – take me instead – “

The words change but the meaning is always the same. When Harry and Voldemort step into the doorway to watch, they are still gripping one another’s hands, as though to hurt each other.

“Stand aside, or you shall die like your husband.”

“Then I’ll die.” Her arms are outstretched, gripping either corner of the cot, and Harry – _that_ Harry – is wide-eyed and whimpering but not properly crying.

“So be it. Avada Kedavra!”

And then Lily falls forward, hitting the ground with a thud, and the baby is screaming now, and Voldemort advances. Sometimes he addresses the baby but this time he does not. With the room still illuminated by the last Killing Curse, he casts another – and they watch it rebound, off a force before Harry that makes a deafening noise, and then the baby is screaming and that version of Voldemort has hit the floor beside Lily. It’s not a clean death – he shudders and chokes as his soul detaches from his disintegrating body. They feel the crackle of magic, wild and vicious, as the dispossessed version of Voldemort attempts to flee.

 _This_ Voldemort has his grip so tightly on Harry’s wrist that his nails must be drawing blood.

Harry neatly levitates both bodies – Lily’s beautiful and immaculate, Voldemort’s falling to dust like bodies fell apart in the Veil realm – to the edges of the nursery before entering. His infant self is screaming, devastated. Harry shakes off Voldemort’s grip to reach into the cot and pick the baby up. “Here you go, you’re alright, you’re alright…. I bet that hurt, didn’t it? Here, sweetheart.” He’s dabbing at the bleeding incision – what will become his scar, his Horcrux, when it heals.

The baby quiets, and Harry assumes it’s because he looks enough like James. But there’s a curious expression on his face, and Harry has to reassess. He’d addressed the baby in Parseltongue. It comes to him more naturally around Voldemort, and now the baby is momentarily fascinated by this new language he hadn’t known a few minutes ago.

Harry looks back to find Voldemort gone.

Fine. Still carrying his younger self, he steps out of the nursery.

Voldemort is in the upstairs bath, hunched over the sink, pale even for him. “You stole a decade of my life,” he hisses, looking at Harry in the mirror when he approaches.

“Piss off.” Harry cannot believe what he is hearing. “Sorry the whole infanticide thing didn’t work out. Maybe if you hadn’t already torn your soul apart, you _paranoid narcissist_ – “

“I will _never_ accept death as a finality.”

“How’s that going for you?” Harry is vicious, alive in a way he hasn’t felt in so long. “You understand nothing if you think this is the way to immortality. It is cowardice.”

“Because I would not resign myself to those petty mortal fears? It is bravery, the magic I sought and the sacrifices I made.”

“It is _fucked_ ,” Harry pronounces. “It is fucked, and you deserve whatever limbo you end up in.”

“So do you.”

Harry gapes at him. “What does _that_ mean?”

“You hate immortality. The very concept of it. Your moralizing is empty.”

“ _Moralizing_. You git, I’m trying to save you from yourself.”

“I do not need to be saved.”

“You obviously fucking do!” Harry gestures wildly with the hand not holding the baby. “Look at you. Look at this. Your soul is coming apart like a supernova and you don’t even _care_.”

“Then leave me to it,” Voldemort hisses. “Leave me to my own destruction, if it’s so richly deserved.”

“I really bloody should.” And Harry turns on his heel, returning to the nursery to set the baby down.

It is grotesque, leaving him in a room with these bodies. He can’t vanish corpses, it would ruin Lily’s job, but he draws out his invisibility cloak and drapes it over her body to collect later. Voldemort… no longer looks like a person altogether. His body is disintegrating rapidly to ash, as though he’s a vampire exposed to sunlight. Bits of his skeleton poke through at his fingertips already.

Harry sets the baby in his cot and casts Dorme, so he might drop off to sleep immediately. They need to get out before Dumbledore or Hagrid or Bathilda or the Aurors arrive, whoever finds the carnage in this timeline.

Voldemort is downstairs by now, pulling open the protective wards strung over the door. “Leave those alone,” Harry says. “You’ve got no right to touch anything.”

“Dumbledore cast these?”

“Obviously.”

“There is a second set of magic.”

“What is it?” Harry is reluctant to approach. He still is furious with Voldemort.

“I don’t know.” He plucks at a strand of dark magic.

“Okay. We have to go.”

“Why?”

“You know why. Unless you’d like to sit for awhile with your corpse?”

“No,” he snaps. He reaches for the door to let them out.

It makes an odd whistling noise, seals itself, and then vanishes from the wall. So do all the windows.

“Shit,” says Harry.

Voldemort whirls to face him. “What have you done?”

“Yeah, ‘cause this is really where I’d like to be trapped. Give me your hand.”

He does, and Harry attempts to step out of the timeline together. Stuck. They are stuck. Harry’s magic is _gone_ , no doubt drained by Voldemort’s death, and he feels hollow and a bit panicked. Harry drops Voldemort’s hand and stares up at the ceiling.

“Do something,” Voldemort hisses. “You have the most powerful wand in existence, _use it_.”

Harry does indeed use it, to cast a thorough silencing charm on Voldemort. He gets a brutal glare, which he ignores as he then attempts to rip open spacetime. It remains whole and inaccessible.

His drained magic shudders as he attempts to blast a hole through the outer wall. His spell rebounds, knocking him back into Voldemort. “Sorry,” he mutters instinctively, before remembering Voldemort is responsible for all this to begin with.

Trapped in his parents’ house on the night of their murders. Trapped with three bodies and his fifteen month old self. It feels like a punishment, like the times in his childhood where he will be locked in the spider-filled cupboard and told to _shut up, just shut up already_.

He wonders if Lily, the real one, will be by to collect the bodies. She typically sent daemons. They would fetch her for something amiss, but not earlier.

He is so preoccupied that he allows Voldemort to snatch his wand from his hand. After lifting the silencing charm, he glares at Harry. “What _can_ you do?” he asks. “Beyond hyperventilation.”

“Twat,” Harry chides, and reaches for his wand.

Voldemort holds it out of his grasp. “Move,” he says shortly, and then he’s plunging the tip of the elder wand into the wards still visible where the door had stood. They too sizzle and then disappear. Brilliant.

Harry is walking away. “Where are you going?” Voldemort says sharply.

He doesn’t know. But he can’t stand in the entryway with Voldemort, as James’s body cools in the living room beyond. “Dunno. Keep the wand,” he says with a wave of his hand. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“You are _useless_ ,” Voldemort snarls. “Grow up and fix this.”

Harry whirls around. His throat is tightening. “I never wanted this,” he says. “I never wanted any of this.” He can still see his father’s body on the living room floor as he takes the stairs two at a time.

He walks the house. They are trapped to some end, he knows that much. Trapped by some _one_ , some _thing_ , by time itself? He steps into his parents’ bedroom – surprisingly untidy, he doesn’t know why he expected why it would be neater, his parents were practically still students themselves – and listlessly opens the wardrobe. He’s never seen its contents before, has never really known his parents as people.

He _doesn’t_ want this. He has never properly grieved his parents. He’s never properly grieved himself. The remains of this life, of _this_ life in particular, are so fragile. He’s pulling out his parents’ dress robes, Lily’s chunky jewelry. It has been a long time since any individual timeline or person has felt real to him. They are all temporary, and Harry is so alone.

At the back of the wardrobe, his fingertips encounter something warm and solid. Amidst Lily’s forgotten jewelry, Harry pulls out Slytherin’s locket.

“What are you doing here?” he mutters, twisting it between his fingers. The locket glints. He drops the long chain over his head.

Beside his parents’ bedroom, there’s a spare room. It’s decorated mostly with Quidditch gear – Portree for his mum and Wasps for his dad in this timeline – and he imagines Sirius and Remus have slept over in this bed any number of times. The bookshelves are filled with a mix of Muggle and magical literature. There is otherwise nothing useful in here.

It’s difficult to mourn the world of mortals, generally. For every person who dies, they are alive in another timeline. For every disaster or crisis or tragedy, it is avoided in another timeline. Harry’s entire world is cast in clear glass, that it’s all technically there but he will look right through it. He has not emotionally connected with this world in a very long time.

Except for this night. Some version of this night _always_ happens. It is the realest thing in his life. And Harry has never properly grieved it.

He is touching bits of stuff around the house now: the woven blanket at the end of the guest bed, the mounted beater’s bat signed by all of James’s teammates, the enchanted salt lamp on the end table. The loo next door has home-brewed potions – Lily, Harry thinks, because James was never meticulous enough for potions – for hair and teeth and skin. And standing before the scalloped mirror, Harry feels the profound loss of never growing up in normalcy. It is this tragedy that _makes_ him the Master of Death, somehow. He was already marked for the profound loneliness of it all at fifteen months.

There’s a noise from the nursery.

When Harry enters, he finds the baby awake again, sitting up quietly. He is sucking on the rim of Hufflepuff’s chalice.

“Oh, _don’t_ ,” Harry sighs, moving to take it. The baby screeches and grasps at it, bursting into tears when Harry lifts it away. “Please don’t cry – don’t cry – look, you _really_ don’t want to ingest dark magic, this is probably what stunted our growth – “

There’s a noise of amusement from the doorway.

“Go away,” Harry says.

“You really don’t want me to.”

Harry tosses the cup onto the nearby sofa, and lifts the crying baby. But when he turns, he finds Voldemort with Nagini at his neck and the diary in his hand. “Oh,” Harry says. “Where did she come from?”

“Beneath your dining table.”

 _His_ dining table. As though this house belongs to him in any meaningful way. “Okay. And I’ve got the locket, the cup….”

“The diadem.”

The diadem is still nestled in his hair. He had forgotten it. “The diadem.” He addresses the house at large. “And what are we supposed to _do_ with these, exactly?”

There is no answer.

The baby is fussy and Harry is bouncing him on his hip. “I know, I know, I don’t like this either.”

“If there were magic to reclaim the Horcruxes….”

“There’s not,” Harry says, too sharp. Voldemort flinches. “There’s not,” he repeats in a more careful way. “I wish there were.” Sealed-off bits of time often had solutions along those lines, that its prisoners must fix dark and bitter magic before they were released. But that’s really, really beyond them right now. He hopes that’s not the answer.

“The Master of Death and custodian of time, and you can’t even clean up a few relics of the past?”

“No. I can’t.” The baby is reaching for the locket at Harry’s chest. “ _Careful, careful_ , don’t you have any teething toys or something?” He looks into the cot for something else to hand the baby.

There is _salt_ on the sheets.

It’s not a lot. He’d missed it before. “Hold him,” Harry says, thrusting the baby toward Voldemort.

“Harry – I’m not holding him. I just tried to kill him.” Voldemort says this in what he clearly believes is a reasonable tone.

“Good, then bloody redeem yourself. I just need to….” He pushes his infant self into Voldemort’s chest, and then he’s turning back, taking a pinch of salt off the sheet. “You _wanker_ ,” he breathes. “What the hell did you do?”

“What?”

“You – intended this Horcrux. I always thought it’d been an accident, at least. _Why_ – “ He lets the salt fall back into the cot.

“Of course I didn’t intend this Horcrux. It ruined my life. _You_ ruined my life.”

“Oh, I’m _so_ sorry. If I could give back your shitty, selfish fragment of a soul, I would.”

“But you can’t,” Voldemort says with satisfaction.

Harry throws up his hands. “I can’t.” He wants to storm out but there’s nowhere for him to _go_. Spacetime never seals itself without a purpose, but this is the first time Harry doesn’t know what it needs from him.

Voldemort pushes past Harry, to set the baby back down. But then he too is peering at the sheets. Then, with a turn on his heel, he is pulling all the furniture away from the walls.

“Er – “

“ _I_ didn’t create the Horcrux,” Voldemort says, with clearly more patience than he thinks Harry is worth. “Neither did – “ He gestures to his body on the floor, mostly concealed by a Disillusionment he’d cast upon entering. “But someone did. If there’s a fissure somewhere, if this timeline isn’t hermetically sealed, then we can get out.”

Harry doesn’t want to admit that it’s clever, but it is. If Voldemort from another timeline had accessed this one somehow…. “But why,” he says, even as he’s pulling the sofa away from the wall. Voldemort is currently inspecting the back of the wardrobe. “Why would you want this Horcrux, if it ruined your life.”

“Mm.” He reveals a ward, prods at it with the elder wand.

“Because – because – “ Harry’s words will not fall neatly in line. “Because my Horcrux is real. As many times as you’ve destroyed it – it’s still real.” And now it feels warm and receptive in his chest, surrounded by all the others.

“Perhaps _you_ created it.”

“Yeah, because it’s been so great for me.” He runs a hand over the wall. There is no magic of interest there.

“My Horcrux made you what you are.”

“Well, _thanks_.”

He’s so clearly bitter and unhappy that Voldemort looks at him in surprise. “ _Harry_.”

“Don’t. Nevermind.”

But Voldemort is stepping in, grabbing the locket to pull Harry close. They were all alive, beating in time with their heart. It feels like the most important thing now. His magic isn’t gone, it’s just _here_ , suspended between them. “I would take it all from you,” Voldemort says lowly.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Harry objects, even as the signet ring burns where he holds Voldemort’s forearm.

Voldemort’s fingers are pushing his hair behind his ear, and Harry knows he’s being manipulated but it’s fine, it is fine. He is touch-starved and so are the Horcruxes. He has been alone for so long.

“I – I can’t think when you’re doing that,” he says, laughing and breathless as Voldemort runs his finger along Harry’s ear. “You can’t shag your way into the job.”

“No, of course not.” Voldemort is leading him backwards, toward the door, because they will not fuck in front of this child, but their magic is insistent, magnetic. “An apprenticeship.” They are pulling each other down the hallway, into the guest bedroom. “Allow me to show you what I could do for you.”

“Bloody smooth,” but Harry is laughing. He falls onto the bed. The Horcruxes are making his head swim – or Voldemort’s proximity – or the way all his magic is concentrated in this moment. The abyssal word for _a thing’s proper place_ buzzes somewhere low in his soul. He hadn’t realized it was himself that had been out of place the entire time.

Voldemort is pulling his robes back, pressing his palm to the front of Harry’s jeans. He’s getting hard, and his fingers fumble with Voldemort’s robes in return, with their hundred fussy buttons. He is satisfied to find Voldemort hard too.

They are rough, reckless with each other because they’re still half-treating it like a challenge and a joke. Voldemort’s hand is tangled in Harry’s hair, yanking his head back to suck at his throat, to tongue the locket’s chain against his skin. And Harry is throwing his legs up, pulling Voldemort on top of him. “You’re _impossible_ ,” he breathes into Voldemort’s collarbone. He is flipping them both, so Voldemort ends up on his back, and Harry is pulling open his trousers, wrestling them down toward his knees as he mouths his pale belly.

He ends up sitting across Voldemort’s hips, erection pressing against his arse. “D'you know….” But Voldemort is already lifting him, fingering him, casting a warm lubrication spell into his hand. Harry hasn’t done this in _so_ long, he’s sure he’ll be bad at it, but he’s still giddy, laughing, alive for the first time in such a long time.

Harry is thrusting backwards to meet Voldemort’s slick cock. He never took off the Horcruxes; the locket bangs on his chest as he thrusts himself back. The Horcruxes buzz gently, happy to be _between_ them. They belong to them both, Harry is realizing. They are entangled, all of them.

Harry rocks himself onto Voldemort’s cock, seated at first but he finds himself falling forward, pressing skin to skin where their robes are pulled open. Voldemort is grasping at Harry’s hips until Harry pulls both his hands up, over his head, forcing an arch into his narrow torso. “ _There_ you go,” Harry rasps, letting his teeth scrape as he ducks low to kiss, suck, bite at his collarbone and his dusky nipples. And then he drops his weight lower, pinning Voldemort, working himself hard on Voldemort’s cock. Voldemort can only gasp for once – _finally_ – at a loss for words.

They grind against one another, and Voldemort is pounding upwards to the extent that Harry will let him, and Harry is shoving him deep into the bed as he fucks himself, and it’s sweaty and antagonistic and _jubilant_ , in its own way. Harry’s erection is leaking pre-come where it rubs along Voldemort’s hip, and their mouths are everywhere but on each other’s: nipping at clavicles, nipples, earlobes. Voldemort pulls one hand free to push his fingers into Harry’s mouth. “ _Suck_ ,” he says in low Parseltongue, and Harry does. When Voldemort withdraws his hand, he’s using his wet fingers to stroke Harry off, and it makes his vision blur.

And then Harry is babbling in Parseltongue himself, the sibilance erotic on his lips. “Oh god – Vol – this is – this is – “ He can’t remember the word for _wrong_. “Really, really good,” he murmurs instead. His hair is falling in his face, the diadem slipping over his forehead. His soul is burning.

With a last thrust and grind, Harry arches and Voldemort pumps him through orgasm, a deep heat that explodes outward. His curling fingertips score marks in Voldemort’s side, and he’s spilling a line of come up Voldemort’s stomach, and then Voldemort is arching beneath him, coming deep inside him, pumping his narrow hips until he’s empty and satiated. They slump.

The locket is still caught between them, thudding in time with their hearts. And so is the signet ring on Harry’s finger.

He barely lifts himself onto his elbows and slips the ring off. “Apprentice,” he muses, still shattered from orgasm. Voldemort holds out his hand and Harry slips it onto his middle finger. “Dunno that it’ll work. I hope it does. I….” He can’t voice how out-of-place he’s been. Instead he raises his empty hand, lets it fall.

Voldemort is quiet, too. Then he offers, “I saw a timeline, after this one, in which I was wearing the ring. I couldn’t access it properly.”

“God, good, at least time isn’t _that_ fucked yet. Also,” Harry squints dubiously at him, “you _stabbed_ me for this ring before. You psychopath.”

“Yes, well, I apologize for that.”

“Give me my wand.” Voldemort does, from where he’d set it on the bedside table, and Harry summons the Horcruxes they had shed throughout the house. “I still don’t know how….”

“Neither did they.”

They. Themselves, together at some elsewhen-elsewhere. It feels profoundly inevitable, and reassuring. He’s quite okay with it. “Ah.”

Voldemort is flipping open the diary, conjuring a quill. _How do we leave this dimension?_ he writes in a neat script.

Harry blinks. “Why would your diary know anything?”

But before Voldemort can answer, there is writing back, unmistakably Harry’s own. **_You can’t._**

Harry’s stomach crashes on itself. “No.”

**_You’ve got to destroy this entire dimension. We weren’t supposed to be there. Sorry for mucking up the magic. It’s all a bit illicit, but we needed to ensure your Horcrux got made and the Hallows got handed off._ **

Harry wants time alone with his future – _future_? – self, to ask if he’s done it right, if he can just take Voldemort with him. He wants to know if he’ll feel normal now, if he’ll start to care about humans again. He has been detached from them for _so_ long. But he knows from previous intersections of his travels that he wouldn’t be able to divulge much. They are already causing dangerous fractures in spacetime.

So they’d destroy this dimension. It is easier than patching it. He lifts the diary out of Voldemort’s hands. **Does Mum want the bodies first?** The corpses scattered around the house, Voldemort’s and James’s and Lily’s own. He doesn’t know all the finer points, but he does know – discrepancy in corpses will ruin things.

**_No, she doesn’t._ **

They’ll take the Horcruxes with them. He doesn’t yet know where they’ll go. Harry would like to live among humans again, and Voldemort would like to be free of them, so – they’ll find somewhere.

He can no longer resist: **Tell me it gets better than this** , he writes in the cramped letters of the abyssal language, like a secret between them.

 ** _I’m having lunch with Ron and Hermione today_** , his other self writes back. **_The Horcruxes will settle in time when you are together, but we haven’t worked out how to return them to Voldemort completely. Hermione’s pulled more research on love for them._** A pause. **_You can’t tell them everything, but you can tell them some things. It will help._**

 **Thanks** , Harry writes back. (Or, well, in abyssal the meaning is nearer to ‘I am indebted to you,’ but it’s all the same really.) And that’s as much as they can share, for the sake of a cohesive timeline.

Harry hasn’t destroyed a dimension before, but he has got a pretty good idea of how to do it. “Get Nagini if you want to take her,” he says, and then they’re both rising from the bed, buttoning their robes to look presentable. Voldemort collects his Horcruxes, putting them into a neat pouch that vanishes into his touch when the drawstring is pulled shut. They leave the bedroom.

Harry wanders down the hallway, into the nursery. He _really_ should leave his infant self to this impending non-existence, as he’s not meant to have any contact with his other selves at all. But he can’t do it. This life hadn’t been his own, but perhaps he can salvage one version of his childhood. “Here, sweetheart.” He’s picking the baby out of his cot, handing him the soft blue blanket he’d been mouthing.

 _This_ is illicit, moreso even than taking Voldemort onward with him. This Moebius loop that will be created – he thinks it will be stable, but really he doesn’t know. But he can’t leave this child to non-existence with the rest of this dimension. He won’t. He carries him out.

Voldemort is standing in the living room, Nagini around his neck. When he sees Harry carrying the baby, his expression twitches in mild disbelief. “We’ve got to get out,” Harry says. “I really don’t know what could go wrong.”

“And you will outrun any adverse effects?”

“Well. _We_ will.”

“Touching.”

Harry hands Voldemort the invisibility cloak; he pins its ruby clasp at his throat. Harry needs the elder wand himself, for now. He hopes one day he won’t.

“We’ve got to do it from the steps, I think.” He casts a backward glance into the house, the carnage of it. It doesn’t look different from any other dimension, really. But it’s evidence, and it must be erased. His magic is whole again, and he uses the elder wand to tug at where the wards framing the front door had once been. It pushes itself out of the wall, already swinging open in anticipation of Harry’s wishes.

Outside, he offers his arm – the one not holding the baby – as though they’re apparating. Voldemort takes it. When Harry steps away from this dimension, he’s closing it like a collapsing black hole behind them. The dimension relinquishes its existence with a pop.

And then they’re weightless, and then the interstitial space is rising to meet them. The mountains are covered in an autumn’s first snow, and there’s a cabin Harry uses sometimes. When the scene resolves fully, he lets go of Voldemort. “This is the space between worlds.”

“It’s quite remote.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Is that necessary?”

Harry shrugs. “Maybe. Come in. I need a minute.”

They enter the cabin,  and Harry wishes a playpen onto the floor. He’d been a sturdy baby before the Dursleys made him into a spindly child. He sets him down and conjures some soft toys. He paces.

“We could stay here,” he says to Voldemort. “Like, no one’s coming after me. But I wanted to spend time – there.” Within the confines of time again.

“You may.”

Harry actually smiles at this. “ _Thank_ you.” His final act with the elder wand is to pop his _own_ wand into existence. He could always feel the hum of the phoenix feather within it, the magic of immortality that has always marked him. Putting it away, he holds the elder wand to Voldemort out like a knife, handle first. “Be good with it.”

It’s a valid request. Voldemort is… Voldemort. But they both know this is a gift and a reprieve, all at once. Voldemort cares for magic and the snarls of time, in a way Harry does not. He must be grateful. He _will_ be grateful, and Harry will be grateful to him.

 

The cabin is small. They will a nursery into existence, but never a second bedroom. They rename the baby James, because it’s too strange to share a name, but they end up calling him Jamie. Harry charms Jamie’s hair the same red as Lily’s, and it falls in soft curls over his scar. Someday Harry may be able to explain his scar to him, and sometime later he may be able to bring him back into the world to live together there, but for now he cares for him here. Voldemort will put him down or feed him, even if it comes with a great performance of reluctance. Nagini becomes fiercely loyal to Jamie, and they are best friends within the month, speaking in a secret Parseltongue not even Harry or Voldemort understand.

Harry teaches Voldemort all he knows of spacetime. Voldemort is hilariously irritated that he can’t learn any of it out of a book, that he must rely on Harry’s tutelage. But Harry is a patient teacher, he enjoys teaching, and he thinks it is the transfer of knowledge that allows Voldemort access to his magic. As they work, unfurling bits of time that need to be fixed, they touch and tease and banter. It’s nice.

And after that, Harry finds new fragments of time. Ones hidden from him, tucked within themselves. Voldemort… knows. Will know. The Horcrux obligated them to one another, entangling their magic, allowing them to share the role of Master of Death. And Voldemort slipped-slips-will slip into moments of other timelines, leaving small gestures that will draw his other selves to that Halloween. If the prophecy wasn’t entirely planted, he at least ensures his previous selves send Severus to hear it. He ensures Wormtail is slighted by James at a critical moment, that Sirius suggests switching the Secret Keeper, that everything aligns so he and Harry end up soulmates in the end. Some of the missing timelines, Harry suspects, had been unsuccessful attempts. It had always been fate, but they’d work hard at it.

Harry asks Voldemort directly, some time later: “You set it up like this, didn’t you? To get us – here.”

It’s terribly ineloquent, but Voldemort knows what Harry means. “Would you even mind if I did?” he says easily.

“Not really.” They’re sitting at a cold mountain stream, with a few swan-faced daemons splashing in the icy water at their feet. He’s grateful for the Horcrux, for their intermingled magic, for their tentative alliance. He might survive immortality, like this.

The Horcruxes did indeed settle just as Harry did. They had been drawn to every place in which Harry and Voldemort’s souls touched, and now that they are united, their place in the universe had become much less complicated. Harry's magic is steadied in Voldemort's presence, less prone to the shocks of the Horcruxes in other timelines now. And Voldemort will confess, one quiet night in the dark, that what remains of his soul also feels much steadier, with the Horcruxes at rest. But he wants them back properly: perhaps not _all_ of them, but some of them.

And Harry has enlisted Ron and Hermione for this project. He’d brought them into the Department of Mysteries one day. (“We’re not allowed in here,” Hermione had hissed even as she follows. Harry looks around to ensure the distraction aura he’d cast with the elder wand is still up. “Yeah, you are. Promise.”) He’d told them – well, a lot. He intimated that he isn’t really human anymore, not that anyone is surprised since he’s survived death twice. He tells them that he can move through overlapping timelines, and so can the Horcruxes, and so can Voldemort, because they’re all tangled in this bit of esoteric magic. But if they would like to – not _destroy_ the Horcruxes, but _reclaim_ them….

Hermione’s eyes are bright before he’s properly finished saying it. “I need to see him.”

“Uh, alright. I mean. Thanks. Thank you.” He’s gone warm and happy, that they’re okay, that they won’t leave him alone to the weirdness that is his life now. It is _such_ a relief.

“He’s still…?” Ron’s brow furrows, trying to remember Voldemort’s fate. Some sort of imprisonment. Harry has carefully steered Shacklebolt’s mind away from ideas of trial or execution whenever he gets near them. The rest of the world half-recalls some very confidential negotiations, a secret prison, and maybe they recall only Harry’s got access.

“We live together now,” Harry says, bracing himself for their reaction. “On another plane. He’s not exactly free, but… he’s with me.”

“Of course he is,” Hermione says. Harry blinks at her. “It’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it? Since the prophecy. Which isn’t to say you _should_ be obligated to him, only that you _have_ been.”

He has been. He’s always been. He can’t tell them that their relationship – alliance – whatever probably precedes the prophecy, that they probably catalyzed it themselves so that everything else would fall into place. It’s what he has ended up wanting, in the end.

Hermione brings him books on dark magic, on Horcruxes, on thaumaphysics. And then she brings him books on soulmates and lovemagic. “Ah – “ Harry blinks down at the titles.

“Honestly I’d choose to be soulmates with absolutely anyone else,” Ron says dryly. “But, y’know. Can’t choose that sort of thing. Especially if you’re a distraction from him wanting to murder people and all.”

Voldemort is still _quite_ indifferent to the sanctity of human life, but that’s a plus for their work. He _embodies_ the Master of Death in a way Harry never did, and he has embraced this privilege with his typical perfection. He has stitched together a timeline that had been torn apart by war, he’d destroyed a lich, he’d expelled a corrupted dimension that had begun running backwards. Really, it is surprising how much Voldemort can do with magic that isn’t officially his, but apparently Death-or-whoever had never anticipated its Master would simply hand their power off. The Hallows anticipated competition and strife, never collaboration. So Voldemort no longer has any interest in mere human conflicts, and it’s not that he _deserves_ any of this, but that the world deserves the order he has made of chaos.

Harry arrives home – what he’s begun to think of as home. The cabin is still dotted with snow, and the skeletal birds and tropical birds perched in the trees both look equally, hilariously discordant in this setting. Harry can see that Jamie’s been digging in the snow drifts near the woodpile. He’s remarkably well-adjusted, for the life he’s been given so far. Harry’s brought him to meet Lily before; he’d like to introduce him to Ron and Hermione soon. Maybe giving him a _normal_ childhood was overly optimistic, but he can give him a good one, anyway.

Nagini is lying near the door, and Harry practically trips over her as he enters. “Goddammit – Sorry, Jamie, that’s a terrible word, please don’t learn it,” he says as Jamie looks up and laughs at him. He’d been throwing his blocks into the fire (non-flammable, because they’d actually done a pretty good job babyproofing the cabin, but it’s still probably not a hobby they should encourage). “Vol?” Harry calls into the cabin. A small noise from its interior.

He finds him not quite asleep in their bedroom. So Harry falls onto the quilt beside him, running fingers down Voldemort’s pale arm so the magic of the Horcrux sparks between them. “Good day?”

“I closed an illicit portal made by a cut-rate dark lord and took away his memories as punishment. Yours?”

Harry grins. “Cheers. I’m bringing Ron and Hermione around sometime. Here,” he clarifies. “For you.”

“Harry….”

“I don’t want to do it alone,” he says. “And we haven’t got to.”

“I know,” Voldemort says softly.

“They knew about the Horcruxes from before, in the war. And Hermione brought me more books today. They’ve been really – good.” He can’t remember why he ever assumed he’d be alone. He’s hopeful that Hermione’s scholarly brilliance and Ron’s tactical brilliance will generate new ideas to reclaim the Horcruxes. Voldemort deserves to feel as whole as Harry does, these days. And Ron and Hermione had always helped him save the world, in some fashion, in every timeline. Why not this one?

“The ring has settled,” Voldemort says, twisting it where it always sits on his finger now. “Perhaps if I keep the others nearby more often. Or perhaps they have demands that must be satisfied first.”

“Won’t that be fun,” Harry says dryly.

“Well. I’ve already got one Horcrux.”

“You’ve got two.”

Voldemort makes a noise of amusement and disgust. It’s saccharine, it’s nothing like what they typically say to one another. But he lifts the heavy quilt to drop over Harry, and then he pulls him a bit closer, and then it doesn’t matter.

**Author's Note:**

> Ahh finally the exchange fics are revealed! Thanks to everyone who's read this, thanks to the exchange organizers for putting everything together, and thanks most to wynnebat, I was so excited to get to write for you :D In addition to all the wonderful ideas you posted in the request – do you remember [that tumblr post](https://crownwithoutstones.tumblr.com/post/177846082290/crack-au-where-harry-becomes-the-master-of-death) about Harry posting the MoD job listing? While this isn’t as glorious as that, I love the idea of Harry taking on Voldemort as an apprentice, it’s so perfect, and I'd been wanting to play with MoD!Harry for a long time anyway. You are such a lovely person, I was so excited to receive your prompt, hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> The title is a variation on Florence + the Machine’s [Sky Full of Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMENejKBcPk) (watch this video, a storm kicks up in the middle of a concert and it’s amazing).


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